Tree Fruit Association Contributed $750,000
05.09.16 Safety for the Tree Fruit Industry
The Washington State Tree Fruit Association puts food safety to the top of their list . I'm Susan Allen with today's Fruit Grower Report.
The Washington State Tree Fruit Association recently contributed $750,000 distributed over a five year period five years in support of food safety research. Jon DeVaney, WSTFA President talked recently about what drove the decision.
DEVANEY: Our industry is obviously very interested in the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act and the issue of food safety in general. All of our packers and growers in general want to make sure we're delivering as safe a product as possible and there's still some data gaps out there, to know exactly where areas of risk are, how we can better manage them as well as engaging with regulators on the Food Safety Modernization Act regulations.
And the Center for Produce Safety in Davis, California was selected
DEVANEY: There was a broad recognition that we need to do a lot more research on food safety but also the need to use research dollars as effectively as possible and as we were looking around collectively at ways to meet that need the rose to the top of the list as to places that were doing good work on food safety research throughout the produce industry.
Partnering with other produce groups is proving beneficial
DEVANEY: And the fact that we're going to be partnering with other produce organizations means that we can get a study done on some broad cross cutting issues like water quality where the cost will be shared through multiple commodities rather than have to do separate studies for each different produce item.
That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Susan Allen on the Ag Information Network of the West.
