The Food Safety Modernization Act: Why Is It Important?

“The owner, operator, or agent in charge of a facility shall, in accordance with this section, evaluate the hazards that could affect food manufactured, processed, packed, or held by such facility, identify and implement preventive controls to significantly minimize or prevent the occurrence of such hazards and provide assurances that such food is not adulterated under section 402 or misbranded under section 403(w), monitor the performance of those controls, and maintain records of this monitoring as a matter of routine practice.”

In other words, if during processing, packaging, shipping and storing of a food there are potential hazards to the food’s quality, counter measures must be implemented. Likewise, records, which can be checked by the FDA, of the monitoring must be maintained.

This is another reason why temperature monitoring is important. Let’s say you were refrigerating meat. To ensure the quality of the meat, steps would have to be made to ensure that the refrigeration temperature stays within acceptable limits. In addition, records of the meat’s refrigeration temperatures must be recorded. A temperature monitoring system could do this for you by sending alerts when temperatures go awry and log its readings for record keeping.