New FDA Regulations Could Raise Costs For Fleet Owners

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering new rules that will effect how food products are hauled long distance. The new regs have some fleet owners sweating, as the new requirements around refrigerating food, cleaning vehicles between loads, and food protection during transportation will be costly to institute. Moreover, according to Fleet professionals, the new regulations will have a chilling affect up and down the food supply chain as suppliers and provider are harmed up increased shipping costs.

New food safety regulations issues by the Food and Drug administration (FDA) are raising tempers and soon possibly costs as well for fleet operators around the nation.

Targeted to shippers, receivers, or carriers engaged in food transportation operations that have less than $500,000 in total annual sales, the proposed regulations are looking to enhance the criteria for establishing sanitary transportation.  The new regulations released early in 2014 are particularly focused on food refrigeration, vehicle cleaning between loads and properly protecting food during transportation.

There are limits to which the new measures apply to beyond business size.  The new regulations do not apply to the transportation of fully packaged shelf-stable foods, live food animals, or raw agricultural commodities that are transported by farms. The regulations do apply to both domestic and international shipments of food to and within the United States, the rules to not apply to food that uses that U.S. as a pass through nation, and thus are never purchased here.

The new regulations will come in the form of modification to the Sanitary Food Transportation Act of 2005, which is part of the Food Safety Modernization Act, and are currently under review.  The FDA is currently taking comments.  Even if the full slate of rule changes are adopted by the federal agency, the implementation of the law will be staggered across the two years that follow the publication of the final set of rules.

Industry Concerns

While in the comment period, the fleet management industry has been rather actively offering input into a process with a lot of potential impact on the future of the industry.

“There’s really not enough attention being paid to this regulatory effort,” Sam Rizzitelli, national director for transportation at Travelers Insurance’s Inland Marine division, told Fleet Owner. “People need to provide as much information as possible to the agency [FDA] because the development of those rules is still ‘in process’ right now. We think there will be a lot of changes but we just don’t know because the rules are still in draft form. We do know that FDA is very receptive to receiving information concerning its proposed rules.”

Others have been sharper in their commentary. General counsel for the National Private Truck Council (NPTC) Rick Schweitzer, rather directly noted during a speech at the group’s annual convention back in April that the FDA lacks experience in trucking or the enforcement of rules for it, meaning it has “no resources to do it,” reports Fleet Owner.

This does not represent a industry wide disapproval for sanitations standards. Instead the concern is one about exposure, Rizzitelli explained, and how the new standards will affect all the players in the food supply chain.

“The critical component is all of this is greater risk exposure. What’s really important is that the rules transcend the supply chain, affecting not just carriers but shippers and receivers too,” he explained to the source.

Further, fleet managers are reasonably certain they are already living up to the sanitation guidelines as a matter of policy already, but that that the requirement of formal compliance will drive-up their costs.  Concerns about the price tag for procedures, employee training, record-keeping and auditing will quickly take a bit out of the bottom line.

Growing Public Concern

Fleet managers are most directly effected by the shipping regulations under consideration, but the total suite of changes to the transportation and sanitation acts have drawn some significant concerns among many players in the food service good chain.

Farmers find themselves confused at to which activities of their farms operations are technically considered “farming activity” under the parameters of the new law.  Currently as formulated, the FDA is dealing with three different federal acts that all define farming activity slightly differently, and require different rules.

There is also concern that new slate of rules, meant to prevent the intentional adulteration of food for public consumption, runs the risk of turning into an expensive hassle with no discernable improvement.

John Petty is the ARM division administrator, provided the board that spoke to the FDA for some of the logistical problems with the proposed rule, reports The Prairie Star.

“It will be a record-keeping headache and very intense,” Petty predicted. “For instance, records will have to be kept indicating where you (farmers) got the human food product and where did it go? Shippers and carriers will have to maintain records of the last three loads that were in each truck and each truck must keep a continuous log that is open to inspection. The rule does not spell out whether the FDA or the Department of Transportation would be inspecting trucks and checking on those records. There is now a new definition of record keeping that comes with tracking adulteration.”

The comment period on the news rules has been rolling forward through out the spring of 2014, and is set to conclude by autumn.