Every year, as temperatures heat up and we head outside for the grilling season, experts warn about the importance of food handling safe practices to prevent food poisoning. There’s no question this is an important topic: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths from foodborne illness every year.
There are common sense measures that hosts can take to protect the health of everyone at the cookout, but food preparation is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to food safety.
While we should all follow safe food handling and storage practices as we prepare and serve our backyard favorites this holiday weekend, our kitchen is merely the last stop in a long journey that introduces countless opportunities for food safety risk.
From harvest to cooler to distribution center storage to grocery store, fruits and vegetables make as many as 20 stops on their way to our grocery carts. Many of those foods must be kept at a consistent 32 degrees to 39 degrees Fahrenheit to maintain their optimum quality and stay safe for consumers to eat. This optimal temperature is critical: any higher and we introduce opportunities for bacteria to thrive. Any lower and we risk quality issues from frozen or frost-bitten produce – tolerable in a smoothie but not ideal for most consumers.
Fortunately, just as cookout hosts have control over keeping cold food safely on ice, grocery stores and food companies have more control over the safe transport of foods than ever before. Through advanced technology and connected sensors that detect tiny changes in storage containers and even individual boxes of food, we are able to monitor food temperature and quality as it moves from fields to warehouses to retail stores.
This network of high-tech facilities, shipping containers and transport containers is known as the cold chain. The technology linking each stop on the cold chain enables Emerson to help safeguard the world’s food supply and to help our customers ensure the safety of the food they grow and sell to consumers.
You certainly won’t win any popularity contests if your deviled eggs make people sick at the cookout, but food safety outbreaks can have an effect that ripples far beyond your neighborhood block party. At any given time, food recalls due to potential contamination number in the dozens, making it important for the industry to have the ability to know precisely where that food was distributed and sold. The latest cold chain technology helps companies create a permanent record of this vital information, like temperature and location, as food makes its journey. These records help companies meet the standards of the federal Food Safety Modernization Act and make it easier to trace food safety outbreaks back to their source.
From home cooks to restaurants to the companies that monitor temperatures from farm to fork, everyone has a responsibility when it comes to food safety. By making food safety a top priority, we’re helping keep our families healthy – and our cookouts fun.
John Rhodes
Group President, Digital & Connected Technologies, Emerson Commercial and Residential Solutions
