Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Elements

The elements of the FSMA can be divided into five key areas:

• Preventive controls- For the first time, FDA has a legislative mandate to require comprehensive, prevention-based controls across the food supply.
• Inspection and Compliance- The legislation recognizes that inspection is an important means of holding industry accountable for its responsibility to produce safe food; thus, the law specifies how often FDA should inspect food producers. FDA is committed to applying its inspection resources in a risk-based manner and adopting innovative inspection approaches.
• Imported Food Safety- FDA has new tools to ensure that those imported foods meet US standards and are safe for our consumers. For example, for the first time, importers must verify that their foreign suppliers have adequate preventive controls in place to ensure safety, and FDA will be able to accredit qualified third party auditors to certify that foreign food facilities are complying with U.S. food safety standards.
• Response- For the first time, FDA will have mandatory recall authority for all food products. FDA expects that it will only need to invoke this authority infrequently since the food industry largely honors our requests for voluntary recalls.
• Enhanced Partnerships- The legislation recognizes the importance of strengthening existing collaboration among all food safety agencies—U.S. federal, state, local, territorial, tribal and foreign--to achieve our public health goals. For example, it directs FDA to improve training of state, local, territorial and tribal food safety officials.