NRA's shotgun approach

I visited with Donna Garren of the National Restaurant Association this morning. As I noted in a previous post, the NRA is looking at endorsing food safety standards of a sort.

"Produce Safety & The Foodservice Industry: A Farm-to-Table Conference" in Monterey, Calif., March 29 to March 30, 2007. One of the "topics of discussion" is "the development of restaurant-industry requirements for produce vendors."

I asked Donna - former food safety whiz at at United and now the NRA's top health/food safety guru - about the standards.

Garren said she wasn't at liberty to reveal who is developing the standards, but said the group working on the document includes staffers of respected foodservice companies with considerable scientific credentials.

She said the NRA itself wasn't developing the standards per se, but would likely endorse them. She expected the standards to run between 20 and 30 pages.

"Anything we share at the conference will be strictly draft; there will still time to be able to have potential input from stakeholders," she said.

Garren also corrected the perception advance by some that these will be mandatory hard and fast rules that NRA members must endorse and abide by.

"That's far from the truth," she said. NRA may endorse a document to their members that can be used in creation and enhancement of existing food safety specifications, she said.

Developing....