Food Safety Matters - Ep. 35. John Butts: Listeria—Seek and Destroy

Duration: 1h 1m
Broadcast on: 09 Oct 2018
Audio Format: other

John Butts is the vice president of research at Land O'Frost. He first joined the company in 1974. His focus there includes the application of scientific principles and quality management technology to develop sanitation process control methods and procedures. John is mostly known for the development of the "seek and destroy" process controls for Listeria which has been adopted throughout the food industry. He is a leading expert on sanitary design and food safety culture and has given over 100 presentations including the North American Meat Institute Listeria Intervention and Control workshops. John is also the founder and president of FoodSafetyByDesign LLC, a private consulting firm he established in 2010. There, he aims to help producers of high-risk products learn how to prevent and manage food safety risks. Listeners can reach him directly by emailing him at [email protected]. Finally, John is a longtime member of the Food Safety Magazine Editorial Advisory Board, along with having written numerous articles for the publication. He received the FSM Distinguished Service Award in 2006. In this episode of Food Safety Matters, we speak to John Butts about:

The many reasons why Listeria is no longer prevalent in meat
The importance of physical barriers and hygienic zoning within a food facility
Why Listeria is so problematic in both wet and dry environments
The proper processes of cleaning, sanitizing, disassembling equipment, and surface sampling
Problems associated with cleaning and disassembling equipment
Where Listeria actually comes from, and where it's commonly found
The definition of a harborage site
Unique ways to sanitize food facility equipment
The importance of having a multidisciplinary team in place
Sanitary design, sampling, and how keeping up with these tasks can save money
The three fundamental types of sampling

Food Safety Magazine articles written by (or featuring) John Butts: Land O'Frost: Breaking Ground in Sanitary Facility Design

The Supply Chain and Food Safety Culture: Processing

Seek & Destroy: Identifying and Controlling Listeria monocytogenes Growth Niches

The Journey to a State of Control

News Mentioned in This Episode: Walmart's Blockchain Food Traceability Initiative FDA Recall/Retail Disclosure Draft Guidance (includes instructions to submit public comments) Congresswoman DeLauro Questions Ground Beef Recall Timeline

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The presenting sponsor of Food Safety Matters is Urophins. A thorough environmental monitoring program is vital for both food safety and risk mitigation. Urophins offers training courses on both environmental monitoring and other common food safety topics such as HACIP, SQF, and FISMA. Learn more about how Urophins can help you with your EMP at urophins.us/EMP. That's Urophins, E-U-R-O-F-I-N-S dot U-S slash EMP. Hello everyone and welcome to Food Safety Matters, the podcast for Food Safety Professionals. I'm Stacey Acheson, publisher of Food Safety Magazine, and I'm here with Barbara Van Renterham, editorial director, and Tiffany Mayberry, digital editor of the magazine. Today's episode will feature Barbara's interview with John Butts, Vice President of Research at Lando Frost. We are very pleased to have John join us on the podcast today. He's widely known for the development of the seek and destroy process controls for Listeria, which have been adopted throughout the food industry. He's a leading expert on sanitary design and food safety culture, and has given, oh my goodness, over a hundred presentations, not including AMI Listeria intervention and controls workshops. I don't even know how many it gets to be after that, so way to go, John. We are very proud to say that he's a longtime member of the Food Safety Magazine Editorial Advisory Board and has written numerous articles for the magazine. So I guess you can understand why we're so pleased to have John join us and to share him with our podcast audience. We've been working on getting John here for a while, so yay! Before we hear that excellent interview, we're going to take a look at a few new stories that have caught our attention since the last episode. Tiffany? So first we are starting off with some news from Walmart. Walmart has announced a new food traceability initiative, which is specifically geared towards their leafy green suppliers. The retailer cites the recent Romaine lettuce outbreak as an impetus for starting this new program. Walmart says that even though FDA and CDC were able to inform consumers, producers, and retailers that the contaminated lettuce originated in the Yuma, Arizona growing region, no one involved in the investigation was able to quickly determine which lots were affected and which were not. This resulted in millions of bags and heads of lettuce that had to be removed from the marketplace, also causing a significant loss in consumer confidence because people had no way to determine if their lettuce was from the affected region or not. Walmart believes that by working together with supply chain partners, their blockchain initiative will be beneficial in multiple ways. First, they'll have the ability to quickly trace leafy green spec to their original source during an outbreak. In turn, this will positively impact human health. In addition, health officials can conduct rapid and more thorough root cause analysis to inform future prevention efforts. And finally, using blockchain will minimize financial impact by not having to destroy unaffected food products that are not linked to an outbreak. In beta testing, Walmart's food traceability initiative has shown that it can reduce the amount of time that it takes to track a food item from a Walmart store back to its original source in just seconds. Traditionally, this process can take days or even weeks. Walmart's program will require its leafy green suppliers to capture digital end-to-end traceability events using the IBM Food Trust blockchain network. I'm guessing that if they see some success with the leafy green suppliers, that they will roll this out for other food commodities that they get in their stores.

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