Over 10 years ago, on Aug. 5, 2010, I wrote my first blog for Meatingplace. The premise of the article, which was titled “Despite best efforts, pathogens and lawyers remain difficult to eliminate,” still holds true. Here we are, over 10 years later, and there are still plenty of pathogens in the food supply, and plenty of lawyers charging exorbitant sums to give food safety advice.

While no one necessarily likes lawyers (I am not a huge fan of most lawyers, either), they do come in handy occasionally. Lawyers are good, for instance, when making difficult food safety decisions, or when helping to navigate and interpret the complexity of various food safety regulations or rules. Lawyers can also help give a heightened level of assurance that a particular food safety decision is appropriate, or articulate the regulatory or business risks associated with an alternative course of action.

Food industry lawyers can offer critical insight and advice to clients during the days and hours leading up to a potential recall. In many cases, when it is determined that a recall is, in fact, appropriate, food industry lawyers will work with their clients to help manage those recalls.

What I have discovered while assisting clients navigate sometimes very complex recall-related issues for over two decades, is that it is extremely helpful to be able to accurately predict how USDA or FDA will react to any given set of circumstances. This becomes critically important when managing very nuanced and unique potential recall situations involving foreign materials, pathogens, chemicals, or any number of other reasons giving rise to the need for a possible recall.

In an effort to share the data and insights that govern recall decision-making, and to give companies additional helpful tools to make more informed decisions on their own, we recently developed the FIC Recall Reporter, a searchable database of every Class I, Class II and Class III recall since the year 2000. Food safety is not competitive, and we designed this free tool to help any food company, without the need for expensive lawyers, determine how USDA or FDA would likely respond to any given recall situation.

The searchable database allows users to organize every recall by agency, description and class, and provides additional valuable details regarding the recall scope and, in many cases, how the issue was discovered. A company faced with a recall and not wanting to hire an expensive lawyer may find the database valuable, for example, when trying to determine whether a recall involving Listeria monocytogenes or an undeclared allergen might be characterized by USDA or FDA as a Class II recall versus a Class I recall. These types of distinctions are important because a Class I recall will extend to the consumer level and require a press release whereas a Class II recall will not.

Indeed, while we may never be able to completely eliminate lawyers, we can make it easier for food companies to better understand and manage recalls on their own. So, while pathogens continue to remain difficult to completely eliminate, it may prove that, with better and faster access to historical recall data, we may begin to question whether we really need “all those lawyers” after all.

Who really needs all those lawyers?

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