Maple Leaf Foods' Food Safety Metrics, The Regulatory Future of Food Safety, and a Long-Term Chemical Safety Strategy at 2025 Food Safety Summit

From an inside look at Maple Leaf Foods’ food safety metrics to the latest regulatory updates from key federal agencies, the 2025 Food Safety Summit closed Thursday with actionable insights food producers can take back to their plants.

Read some of the insights shared below, and learn more by reading ProFood World's coverage of Wednesday at the summit.

Spir Marinakis with Maple Leaf Foods explained the company's Food Safety Incident Rate involves tracking six potential failure points at its plants.How Maple Leaf Foods tracks food safety

After a 2008 food safety failure at Maple Leaf Foods killed 23 people, the Canada-based food producer worked to ensure such an incident doesn’t happen again.

This started with a series of performance metrics to build back after the incident, but the protocols needed rethinking by the time Spir Marinakis, VP of Safety, Quality and Technical Services at Maple Leaf Foods, joined the team in 2016, she explained at the summit.

Starting the journey to develop a new plan, “I talked to the leadership of the organization, and the people in the plants who make our food, because in a manufacturing facility, they’re the ones that actually matter when we talk about food safety culture,” said Marinakis.

The result was a revised set of metrics including a Food Safety Incident Rate (FSIR), which involves a series of indicators to assess plants.

“The majority are indicators of failures in the system, failures of the company to do the right thing,” explained Marinakis. This goes against the typical emphasis on leading indicators that catch issues before they happen, but “if we just focus on leading indicators, there’s always a possibility that people are going to decide, ‘I’m not going to put that information in the system,’” she said.

The six failure points Maple Leaf Foods tracks include:

-  Product recalls: “a recall is a complete failure of your system,” Marinakis said. Whether is leads to serious harm or not, a recall indicates multiple protective layers have broken down.

-  Near misses: A near miss signals that protocols weren’t followed, even if the product is deemed low risk after a formal assessment. For example, a minor mislabeling may not trigger a recall, but it’s still a red flag to review processes in the facility.

-  Pathogen positives: Maple Leaf Foods conducts extensive environmental swabbing in order to find positive test results in Zone 3, or before the contaminant hits food contact surfaces. “If it hits the food contact surface, which is what Zone 1 is, it’s a failure of the system,” Marinakis said.

-  Regulatory non-compliance: While some might argue regulators are out of a company’s control, Marinakis disagrees. “You can proactively do that by building a better relationship,” she said.

-  Repeat findings in internal audits: In Maple Leaf Foods’ internal audit program, “If they come in the second year and you haven’t dealt with it, it’s unacceptable,” said Marinakis.

-  Food safety complaints: Measured as food safety complaints per million consumer units sold, this metric reflects real-world failures that escaped internal systems.

The company combines these failure points with a set of leading indicators including non-conformance, repeat issue analysis, internal audit findings, task observation trends, and more as it regularly assesses food safety at its plants

Ongoing change in food safety regulation

Kyle Diamantas (left) shared about a new FDA post-market chemical review plan, focusing on chemicals currently in the food supply.As leaders from the FDA, USDA-FSIS, and CDC shared their priorities and updates during a town hall at the summit, their remarks shared a common theme: change.

Kyle Diamantas, J.D., Acting Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods at FDA, outlined the agency’s modernization efforts following a 2022 external review. “That independent review revealed that the structure of FDA food portfolios sometimes hampered our ability to leverage our resources,” he said. In response, FDA launched the Human Foods Program (HFP) in 2024, unifying its food-related efforts under three pillars: preventing foodborne illness, ensuring chemical safety in food, and improving nutritional outcomes.

Diamantas emphasized the role of technology at FDA. “We recently hired FDA’s first ever Chief AI Officer,” he said, noting how generative AI can play a role in the administration’s modernization strategies. “We envision being able to leverage AI in many facets of what we do, including inspections, import alerts, recalls, and in our pre- and post-market work,” he said.

Also new at FDA, Diamantas shared about an upcoming post-market chemical review plan, opening for public comment later this month. “That plan will include the creation and rolling out of a modernized, evidence-based prioritization scheme for reviewing chemicals presently in the food supply,” he explained.

Denise Eblen, Administrator at the USDA FSIS acknowledged the ongoing changes at USDA and the wider federal workforce.

“USDA is still in transition, and we’ll keep you informed as we learn any more about changes that might impact FSIS,” Eblen said. “FSIS’ frontline positions are considered public safety positions, and so we continue to hire the workforce necessary to meet our obligations to ensure a safe and abundant food supply.”