The Eurofins Rapid Microbiology Laboratories, Inc. group recently attended BIFSCo 2026 in Fort Worth, Texas. While there, we were able to sit down with Dr. Mindy Brashears, Under Secretary of Food Safety with USDA, for a quick interview regarding FSIS priorities, HACCP validation, and food safety.
Eurofins: What about, let's start out with one on validation of HACCP programs as it has a bunch of areas that tie to ready-to-eat, maybe beef tallow, there's a bunch of hot new products in the market. What are some of your thoughts around some of that?
Dr. Brashears: Sure. I'm going to start very broad because I think a lot of people have forgotten about HACCP validation and how important it is. Now, there's a lot of ways to validate. Sometimes there's really strong data in the scientific literature that you could use to measure the concentration of an acid, or whatever it may be used in a fresh product, but you have to make sure you use the parameters within the research paper.
When you think about ready-to-eat, we have a couple of components here. We have our Appendix A and Appendix B on cooking and chilling. But there's a lot of data gaps there.
You bring up tallow, and that's an interesting product. To render tallow and make it edible, the temperature you have to get it to is very high, but you still need to make sure it's validated and that it kills the pathogen.
So, you know, sometimes in some cases, it may be necessary if you're operating at a lower temperature to do your own study, but most of the time you're going to be able to validate it with d-curves and the death curves that have been already put out there.
Eurofins: What do you see are some of the biggest challenges here in your new role for 2026 and going forward?
Dr. Brashears: Well I will say that every day is a new day at FSIS. But we have our big challenges with our foodborne pathogens and our rule making. So I'll actually start with some of our new rules that we're rolling out. The secretary just really had a great launch of Product of USA. And this is about transparency on the labels. We want consumers to know what that means. And the bottom line is it means that animals are born, raised, harvested and processed in the US. So we're really excited about that labeling and look forward to that moving forward.
The other big piece of rulemaking relates to line speeds. And, you know, I'm never going to speak about something that I'm more excited about. But, you know, at the end of the day, it comes down to affordability. It comes down to efficiency in the plant, and line speeds have more to do with how quickly the inspector can inspect each and every carcass.
So those rules are out. The proposed rule, we're excited about that. Excited to get those finalized. That's something I started the first time I was in this role. And you usually don't get to see a rule finished. So, you know, it's like it'll be exciting.
But back to what we're really concerned about are our foodborne pathogens. So, let's talk about Salmonella. It's very important to this administration. We had a couple of items that we rolled back, but we're not acting on right now. But we're going to be really more aggressive in our approach to Salmonella expanding it across species, really trying to incentivize the industry to do testing, verification, validation. Getting back to the basics of HACCP and some of those things. And so we're going to be focusing a lot on that, including an expectation on the industry to test.
And then also looking at quantification of Salmonella and looking for highly pathogenic Salmonella. That's very important as well.
Eurofins: Okay. Anything else?
Dr. Brashears: Listeria is also very important to us. Listeria, as you know, a couple of years ago, we had a major outbreak, and we lost some lives due to ready-to-eat meats. The agency has implemented a laundry list of activities. I am awaiting a follow up report to see where we're going to go with this program next. Once I get this data, there's a lot more companies operating in Alternative 3 than we ever realized, so there might be some additional testing requirements and other things related to Alternative 3 in order to make sure that we put them in a good spot and where we avoid the next emergency of another outbreak.
Eurofins: What testing diagnostics technology is still the biggest gap from a research and applications standpoint?
Dr. Brashears: I really think that testing is so important. I mean, and I always say, I've said throughout my career, testing is not an intervention, but it determines if your interventions are working. So, if you don't have testing in place, you don't have the data in place, then you're not going to be able to evaluate if your system is effective. So, testing is so critical and important.
I want to know the accuracy of the Salmonella quantification methods. Right. So, getting a handle on that, we're doing some work with our partners. Mission-to-mission effort with ARS to determine the accuracy of some different Salmonella quantification methods. Also finding the pathogenicity gene, as you know, right now with that group of genes, there is the stx and eae of E. coli, can we find that in Salmonella? We want to go after those, the ones that are really causing the illnesses, so we can really make a move in those public health metrics.
Eurofins: Where do you see testing and requirements for the various species?
Dr. Brashears: Obviously, they have their own bacterial challenges, pathogenic challenges. You know, I've been talking about the trends and what the data look like. Well, if you look at beef and pork, with Salmonella you see it go down in comminuted product. Well, actually in beef it does. In pork, the comminuted has really stayed high, and in poultry it's actually trending up. So that is a concern for Salmonella. Now in parts, in whole carcasses, it's good. But when you see that data and see it going up in the last four years, it's just every year ticked up. So I think that's the problem.
Like I already mentioned, Listeria testing in ready-to-eat is going to be very important. And then the E. coli testing, we're still going to focus on that, we still get E. coli positives. But looking beyond the O157:H7 really those other O groups are the ones we're seeing.