Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Prior to the recall in August, Maple Leaf had what would be considered a relatively aggressive sampling program for listeria in the environment. This includes two areas within the environment: the food contact surface; and the rest of the plant environment, which could take in the sides of equipment, the floors, the drains, the walls, the walkways, and so forth.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Before August, the process, as recommended in global best practice, was to respond to each product-positive sample by remediating the site. This means aggressive sanitation, cleaning, and monitoring of the site. Our internal policy was to get three consecutive negatives after a positive on a food contact surface.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  To your second question regarding support for smaller companies and smaller plants, certainly, that is a concern. One of the objectives we'll have as part of our leadership role in this area of food safety is to encourage and work with our peers in the industry to develop and share best practices.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Is this what is required from April 1 going forward, as part of the new listeria policy?

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Very briefly, I'll reiterate what I said earlier, which is that food-borne illness epidemiology is a challenging subject, and getting to root cause and collecting these types of data takes time. Certainly it might be instructive for this committee to contrast the timelines of this event to those in other recent large food-borne illness outbreaks.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  As I responded to Mr. Miller earlier, our team has assessed the “Lessons Learned” document. There is one reference to the transfer of information in PDF format versus an Excel spreadsheet that would be more readable during a crisis situation, and certainly we can put in systems to address that need.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I would only add, Mr. Miller, that we just received the “Lessons Learned” report, as I assume you did as well, over the weekend. As our food safety team reads through and analyzes the lessons learned from CFIA and the other agencies, we'll look for the take-away lessons from that and assess what we can do better as a company and as an industry.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Thanks, Michael. You raise an excellent point, Dr. Duncan. The science of food-borne illness investigations and epidemiology into food-borne illness outbreaks is a very difficult one. It's one that our scientific community, our government communities, and the industry are getting much better at, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  You've asked two questions. I'll answer the second first, if you don't mind: how often does a food processing plant need to be monitored for listeria to assess control? That's actually the subject of a two- or three-day workshop to really get at the answer to that question. But to try to simplify it as much as I can for this purpose, it requires a tremendous amount of data and data analysis and sophisticated pattern recognition and understanding of the unique processing environment in which you're assessing.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I'd just like to add that I'm not certain of the reference you have for 2005 and the changes that were made then. I'm not aware of any environmental testing that was required by CFIA prior to this most recent policy. However, there was a requirement to take product samples to be tested for listeria monocytogenes as part of export requirements, as part of the FSIS USDA government regulations.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Mr. Allen, you raise a good point. Visual inspection certainly plays a role in producing safe food, and having a trained, knowledgeable, and experienced inspection force is a critical factor in food safety. There's no debate regarding this. We would all agree. Over the past 10 or 15 years, the food industry has begun to understand what it takes to control listeria within a refrigerated food processing environment.