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European Chilled Food Federation

ECFF

Promote the quality and safety of production and distribution of chilled foods, represent the industry and its views to European decision makers and regulatory bodies, coordinate the activities of national chilled food organisations, liaise with other industry associations, regulatory authorities, research organisations, retailer and consumer groups, using the communication channels of ECFF to promote exchange of relevant information, developing advice and manuals to improve the development of chilled foods, setting minimum standards for chilled food processing plants within the framework of European and national regulations.

Lobbying Activity

Meeting with Koen Van Dyck (Head of Unit Health and Food Safety)

6 May 2025 · Exchange of views on implementation of Regulation (EC) No 2073/2005 as regards Listeria monocytogenes

Response to Monitoring and reporting of molecular analytical data within foodborne outbreaks

13 Sept 2024

The European Chilled Food Federation, representing producers of prepared chilled foods, notes that there is no mutually agreed international nomenclature for genetic variations. This is a huge barrier to making use of WGS data and must be resolved internationally >prior< to making data sharing mandatory. Otherwise the data will be unable to be interpreted clearly, severely limiting if not invalidating the purpose of the technology and the data resultant from it. FBOs providing samples for generating WGS data must be provided with their own data as it arises to assist them in understanding and potentially improving controls and dealing positively with any issues identified by the data. There is no mention of this critical flow of information back to the FBOs, which is a detriment to Food Safety and systems improvement as well as resulting in missing out on potentially critical traceability overlay data which only FBOs have. There should be no requirement on FBOs to share data or samples without this. Notably, any FBO WGS test result data submitted to a government/agency stays in that system forever so if a match is found in the distant future the company having submitted the data can be (and has already been) blamed for a current/recent outbreak, with allegations made of persistent contamination, without intermediate data points to confirm. By its nature the proposal will not result in a representative dataset from across the millions of FBOs in the EU since only those with technical resource are carrying out WGS. Such businesses are most likely to have the best controls in place but would be most likely to be blamed for an issue as other companies with less resource do not do WGS. Either every FBO does WGS and submits data or there should no compulsion or pressure on those who do to share their data.
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