On September 30, 2019, FDA announced the establishment of the Food Safety Dashboard, which is designed to measure the progress of the seven foundational rules of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), to track their impact, and to help FDA to refine its implementation of the rules. As FDA embarks on a New Era of Smarter Food Safety, continuing the successful implementation of FSMA will support the Agency’s goal of reducing illness and death due to preventable contamination of FDA-regulated human and animal food products, explained the Agency in a press release. (For more information on FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety, see our September 28 blog.)

The initial metrics on the Food Safety Dashboard will begin to track outcomes for three FSMA rules in the areas of inspections and recalls. These are:

• “Current Good Manufacturing Practice, Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls” rules for both human food and food for animals (preventive controls rules).
• Imported food safety, including data relevant to the “Foreign Supplier Verification Program” (FSVP) rule.

“We plan to update the data for these three FSMA rules quarterly, with our goal being to ultimately publish metrics for all seven rules,” stated Acting FDA Commissioner Ned Sharpless and FDA Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy and Response Frank Yiannas in a statement about the Dashboard. They added, “Many factors will influence these data over time, especially in the early phases of implementation.” FDA expects that it will take several years to establish meaningful trends from the data on the Dashboard.

The Food Safety Dashboard is available as part of the FDA-TRACK program, the FDA’s agency-wide performance management system.