Notifications
This is another opt in feature of FoodTRACE available at no additional charge. FoodTRACE monitors recall activity in the United States done by the both the FDA and the USDA. These are available from their websites as well. What FoodTRACE does is categorize these recalls for your convenience. If, for example, you only ship or handle apples, you may select to be notified of recalls and alerts by these departments only on apples. If you only handle fruit, you can limit the notifications to that area. There are typically recalls and/or alerts between the FDA and USDA of some nature practically every day. During the PCA (peanut) event, there were as many as 20 recalls by the FDA daily for a period of time so the standard daily notification by these agencies can be burdensome. Those recalls are not limited only to food either as the FDA handles drugs also so a myriad of recalls in that area are constantly appearing as well. We allow you to be notified only on an area that you request. That notification option is optional.
There is another notification area that is automatic if you are a FoodTRACE client and you would have to specifically opt out of it to stop those notifications. If there is an alert or recall on a product that is associated with one or more of your products, you are automatically notified. If there is a recall on mushroom soup and your company handles mushrooms you are notified so it goes to the lowest level. If there is a salad mix that is recalled, any company in the FoodTRACE system that handles one or more of the ingredients in that salad mix, those companies are notified. If your company handles salad mix in that case, FoodTRACE will let you know, based on the information in our system, whether you are exonerated, likely exonerated, implicated or potentially implicated.
FoodTRACE will not always have that information first if your company is a source as you may be contacted by the FDA prior to governmental notices of recalls or alerts. In those cases, we encourage one of your first steps to be notifying FoodTRACE so that we can assist, as early as possible, in determining the depth, level and scope of the issue and work directly with your company to manage that event and hopefully keep it from becoming a notified alert or recall.