Don't Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

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David Hatch: The biggest aha moment was when I realized that 90 to 95 percent of testing is managed on spreadsheets or paper. It's not in a database. So to correlate, to be able to relate a finding to another finding, to a trend, it's impossible. When all of your records are in a three ring binder on a shelf, Full of paper.

Nobody's

intro: got to eat. And nobody likes getting sick. That's why heroes toil in the shadows. Keeping your food safe at all points. From the supply chain to the point of sale. Join industry veterans Francine L. Shaw and Matt Ragucci for a deep dive into food safety. It all boils down to one golden rule. Don't. Eat. Poop.

Don't eat poop.

Matthew Regusci: Alright David, this is number two day, second day, of Food Safety Consortium. I apologize, we have done a million interviews, so we seem a little slapstick crazy, it's because we've done a million. I think this is interview number 16 .

David Hatch: Yeah. So not only is it day two of the Food Consortium Food Safety Event, it's also the end of the event.

And so we, it is the end of the event. We have been nonstop on with people and talking, haven't we? We have for however many hours in a row this has been plus then you go out to dinner and you do it. And then my poor wife gets to get a call from me at 10 at night saying, I'm really too tired to talk. So was there anything important that happened today?

Yeah. Okay. I'll, I'll call you tomorrow as I'm driving home. Exactly. Just checking in, hun. I'm still alive.

Francine L Shaw: Yes. Yeah. Well, and my poor husband gets up so early in the morning that by the time I get back, he's already in bed. So he's probably wondering if I'm still alive. So yeah.

Matthew Regusci: So this makes for fantastic audio, but we are right in front of David Hatch from Neogen.

David, tell us a little bit about yourself and your company and what it is that Neogen does.

David Hatch: Sure. Neogen is one of the world's largest suppliers of food safety testing platforms. for swabbing, doing your environmental testing, performing product testing, allergen testing. We provide the test kits, the media, we supply companies of all sizes all around the world.

We sell into 140. And we are also now introducing to the market some really innovative software for controlling all of that testing program, whether it's environmentals, product tests, or even your sanitation program. And when you say

Matthew Regusci: environmental, I just want to make sure that the audience knows, because we like to say our podcast is food safety podcast for moms.

You're not talking about actually testing the air or the soil. You're actually talking about testing the environment within the facility,

David Hatch: correct? Correct. Correct. So when I say environmental testing, it's part of the FISMA regulation where you have to conduct testing of the food contact surfaces, non food contact surfaces, all around your facility.

But in the facility, it could include air testing as well. Yes, particularly. It actually is a problem area. Yes. Vents and drains, right? Those are the places where you have. Francine

Matthew Regusci: has a fantastic picture of mold around a vent.

Francine L Shaw: So yes, my husband and I went out to eat last weekend, and we don't eat out a lot, but the particular restaurant we went into was like this vent, I swear to God, it's not been cleaned in five years, and the mold coming out of that vent, and because of my background and what I do, this stuff, but it's like, yeah, so yeah.

David Hatch: I didn't know this at the time. I started my career actually in working in television, and I used to be involved in broadcasting the Boston Bruins hockey games from the old Boston Garden. The old Boston Garden was known to have dust bunnies. We'll call them, I forget if it's stalactites or stalagmites that hang from the ceiling.

stalactites. They were six or seven feet long that had accumulated over the decades in this old place. One night our cameraman working way up high in the ceiling in the basket, we call his camera position to get that over the ice view, had one fall on him.

Matthew Regusci: What?

David Hatch: And we heard this shriek over the headsets.

Yes. We're like, what's going on? And he said, one of the stalactites just fell on me. But he said, I'm really, I feel really bad for the fans down below near the glass and the end of the arena who just had their beers filled with who knows what that was,

Matthew Regusci: but at least it was cold.

David Hatch: Right. I witnessed in my lifetime was probably my first major food safety incident, uh, in that moment, and I didn't even know it.

Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: Oh my heavens. Who knows what was in that? Yeah. So yeah, the things that we have seen over the years, you know, not just in restaurants and facilities and things would just make the average person's toenails

Matthew Regusci: curl. So Neogen is basically a niche within a niche, a very large niche within a niche, but you're basically providing everything needed for food safety laboratories, both in house

David Hatch: and third party, correct?

Laboratories and the food safety teams that are working the production floor. So it's outside the lab as well. In fact, more, I would say outside the lab. Oh, cause you're

Matthew Regusci: providing

David Hatch: the

Matthew Regusci: kits for it, swabs and water sampling and air sampling and all that different type of stuff

David Hatch: as well. Exactly, exactly.

Although the labs are a large customer segment. Of ours because they use those kits on behalf of their customers. They use our devices and a lot of customers have their own in house lab where they're using that. But out on the floor, the food safety technicians are also walking around and actually swabbing all of the equipment and that's our kits.

And test methods as well.

Francine L Shaw: So what is the number one thing that is tested for

David Hatch: the number one thing that is tested for? Boy, that's a tough question. It depends on the food segment. We're talking about but by and large I would say What a lot of companies do these days is what's called sanitation verification Testing where they're doing what's called ATP.

Yeah, which stands for adenosine triphosphate, but it is a Test method that gives you a bacteria count for what you test And that relative count will tell you it'll indicate whether you've got something there And based on that versus the last test, is it growing? And so that's something you want to keep track of every day after every sanitation cycle, every sanitation shift.

You want to then go out pre production, you want to do an ATP swab to make sure that Now my production area is clean, clear to operate and sanitize it should theoretically, you shouldn't find anything because it's been sanitized. Correct? Well, you're always going to have some. Yeah, it's not sterile.

You're going to have some count, but you shouldn't find anything that's alarming. Yeah, not like a huge count. If you do, there's the old age old, you missed a spot, right? There could be an issue that the current mix of chemicals and cleaning methods aren't getting at it. Yep. And so you want to know that because that could exacerbate into a real problem.

And this is where now you're going to conduct other types of tests to see, okay, well, what is it? And so you'll test for listeria, you'll test for salmonella, you'll test for pathogens now, because what you want to make sure of is it's not going to be something deadly, because then you got to stop production.

Francine L Shaw: Right. And maybe you answered this question. How long does it take to get the results back?

David Hatch: Well, for the modern day ATP tests that are out there, you're going to get a result back in seconds. You're going to do the swab, you're going to put it in a reader device, and it's going to give you a count right then and there.

Francine L Shaw: Right. Okay. So later it doesn't really do anything. It doesn't help you. Right.

David Hatch: I don't know. So you want to have what's called a rapid test method.

Francine L Shaw: Right. Okay.

David Hatch: All right. But there are then those follow on tests I was mentioning. Those have an incubation period. And they're getting shorter and we have like product called Listeria right now, which will give you a Listeria positive reading or presumptive positive within an hour or less.

And that's been a huge boon to the industry, especially in areas where you're like a food contact surface, where you want to do some investigative testing to make sure that you can start your production run on time because the cost of not doing that is very high. Yeah, I was at a plant in Arkansas where they had a gas fired power plant next door to the production facility.

That's how big this facility is. It has its own power plant. Yeah. That they fire up and then thousands of people show up to work multiple production lines to produce that food product. I can't mention who it is. Delaying production start there has a massive six figure cost. Having to miss a shift has a seven figure cost.

Missing shifts over a course of days has an eight figure cost. So it's, it builds up very quickly. So testing becomes actually a mission critical part of. Not just the food safety operation, but the operations of a processing plant.

Matthew Regusci: Wow, so One shift is hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, are millions of dollars, multiple days, tens of millions of dollars.

In these large scale, yeah. Wow. Large scale production. It's large scale. Yeah. And so are the costs. So they're in house labs. When you say presumptive positive, is it because it's more like PCR and you're able to find the actual protein? So you don't know if it's actually alive or dead, but you know that Listeria was there.

David Hatch: Correct. And then what you want to do is you want to conduct more tests. You want to speciate to see, well, is it a form of listeria that's harmless? And there's many different variants. Is it a variant that's harmful? Is it listeria mono? Is it deadly? And you want to know this. Of course, you can't test every single swab for that level of detail, at least not yet.

And those are the things that scientists are working on now is to develop those kind of capabilities. But what you can do is you can look at the indicators for that. These first starting with the counts and then moving up to pathogen tests for presumptives, then moving to, okay, I know I have something here, I better figure out what it is.

And I talked to organizations all across the spectrum of all food types in the meat industry, in the produce industry, frozen food industry, ready to eat snacks. And they all have a different take because they all have different risk profiles. All right, so there's this, also this factor of is there a kill step?

Where did I find this? Well, I found it before my kill step. Well, I'm going to cook the heck out of that thing anyway. Let's look afterwards and see if that killed it. Then I don't have to speciate, maybe. But if I've got a line of green beans flowing down, and they're going to be packaged with a mixed vegetable pack, and they're not getting cooked, I better speciate.

Matthew Regusci: So you've been in this for a while. What is your biggest a ha in the testing world since you've been in it? in the food manufacturing and testing world. And then where do you see the future going?

David Hatch: Great question. That's an easy one for me. The biggest aha moment was when I realized that 90 to 95 percent of testing is managed on spreadsheets or paper.

It's not in a database. So to correlate, to be able to relate a finding to another finding, to a trend, It's impossible when all of your records are in a three ring binder on a shelf full of paper. In fact, just to find the data takes hours, right? So now I've got an issue, right? Let's say I've done a product test on my finished product packaging, and I pulled one randomly from the line, and I test it, and I find I've got an issue.

Can't ship it. But now I have to do a root cause analysis, and I have to go back and find where did it get into my product? Was it an ingredient that came from a supplier? That means that whole run has to be scrapped. Did it come from some area of process in my production lines? All right, now I can start cutting a margin around that.

But if I don't have the data to tell me, If I wasn't collecting test data along the way and recording that in a database that I could look up and say, hey, by lot ID, I know every single place that this product touched in my production facility, and therefore I know what tests to look at. If I don't have that, then I'm sunk.

I face no other option than to scrap that entire lot and start over again, and that's where those seven and eight figure costs start coming in. That's a really bad day. And the aha moment for me was because I come from a whole background, 30 years working in database technology, I come from a whole background of, gosh, I know I can just in a relational database.

I can relate as the name suggests everything that's happened along the way in my testing program. I'm going to find all the places where I should have caught it. So I can remediate that. And I can take action. And the aha moment for me was, wow, this industry is about 15, 20 years behind other industry segments when it comes to that data driven capability.

Francine L Shaw: So there are so many of us out there trying to change that mentality, that spreadsheet. And paper mentality. And we have been for years in various aspects of the industry. And it's hard because it pick a segment of the industry. It still exists. It's changing, but it's changing slowly.

David Hatch: It is. It is. Makes me laugh and want to cry at the same time.

We was in a session here at this event, and this question gets asked at almost every event I go to. And someone says, how many of you are still using paper to manage your testing program? And some hands will go up in the room. Well, today that question was asked. In the room, no hands went up and the panelists to ask the question to the audience said, Oh, wow, you guys are also advanced.

And they said, or how many of you were just too embarrassed to answer that question? And then some hands went up. It was hilarious. Right? It's a point of shame almost because people are realizing that they're working in an industry that is. And they want to have these capabilities, but the problem is that the corporate management at food companies hasn't found a way to justify the digital transformation that needs to take place.

And it's not that they don't want to. It's that the food industry operates at the lowest margins of any industry in the world. On average, it's only a 2. 8 percent margin, which is the lowest in all industries in the world. It is the most commoditized industry in the world, right? So, of course, it's got the lowest margins.

So, how do we get there, right? How do we make this happen? And that's what my mission is at Neogen, is to find ways to make this technology available to the world. At as low a cost as possible, I was talking earlier with Matt about comparing it to the cost of coffee. We spend 0. 50 per cup at the office when we're buying coffee in bulk and we're just supplying it to our teams.

We spend 0. 50 per cup of coffee. I know this has gone on weird tangent, but Stay with me. Well, if you have 800 people working a shift across your multiple production lines in your big processing plant, and they're all, let's say half of them are coffee drinkers, right? 400 of them. That means you're spending 200 a shift on coffee, and that's if they only have one cup each.

They have two cups. I'm a two cup guy. How much are you spending? You spend 400 a shift. You run two production shifts. You're spending 800 bucks a day.

Matthew Regusci: I'm at least five bucks.

David Hatch: You're at least five bucks. You get a Starbucks. That's what I call it. No, no, no. I would drink

Matthew Regusci: 10 cups of coffee.

David Hatch: Oh, okay. Okay. I see.

Yeah. I mean, we

Francine L Shaw: live on caffeine. Yeah,

David Hatch: we do. Right. I always think that's why they call it Starbucks.

Francine L Shaw: They charge you

David Hatch: five bucks. It's like a star, right? Hold up your hand. That's a Starbucks. Anyway, the technology. That will digitally transform this whole process, cost less than the coffee, cost less than the coffee.

But I say it as a joke, but it's actually not funny. It should be that easy.

Francine L Shaw: So I'm looking at you like this because I read a lot of articles for trade magazines. And I try to about AI technology, the advancement in technology, why this is important, why we should embrace it, why we should use it and get away from, you know, the spreadsheets and the pen and the paper.

And that is great.

David Hatch: Yeah, it really is a good analogy. I like analogies that go off topic. Right, because you have to think differently sometimes, we tend to think about, well, but we put all this time and effort in creating this amazing spreadsheet. And that's what the hands in the room work going up today because they actually do have a lot of spreadsheets and they think that's a digitization of their process.

And then I asked the question, okay, how does the data get in the spreadsheet? Well, we type it in, we hand enter it. Oh. Okay. But there's no human error in there, right?

Francine L Shaw: And it takes no labor to do that because that's not expensive.

David Hatch: That's not expensive. I was speaking to someone about this and she finally just said, yeah, deep sigh, I just want my Fridays back.

So what do you mean? You want your Fridays back? Well, Friday's the day that I spend putting all the information into the spreadsheet and building a pivot table. Which is a swear word in some circles and creating my charts and graphs for the Monday morning management meeting. And I said, wait a second.

All right. First of all, Friday, a day is, do you work five days a week? Yes, I do. That's 20 percent of your week you spend managing and massaging your spreadsheet jockey. What's your degree in? I'm a microbiologist. And so you wake, you woke up every day thinking, I'm going to use spreadsheets in my microbiology career.

No, but the bigger problem is this. Wait, a whole week of activity went by before you put it into a digital form so you could analyze it. But then it's not going to get looked at until the Monday morning management meeting. Timed information is really important. We keep talking about becoming preventative, right?

Preventative food safety. Well, if you see something sooner, you can probably head off a problem before it's a big problem. To me, that's preventative. If you're waiting until the Monday morning management meeting, you're reacting to something that happened long ago. Even when you talk about traceability, right?

Which is. It's really important. I think it's a very important capability to have you need to be able to trace back so you can find the root cause of something so that you can prevent it happening again. There's a preventative stance there. All right, but let's also admit that if you're doing, that's because you're reacting to something bad that already happened.

So I think in combination, you have to have traceability capability, but you also have to have. near real time analytics. You need to have faster time to information so that you're not doing another traceback exercise weeks from now. I think they work in combination. That's a very good point.

Matthew Regusci: We have two more questions for you.

One is what do you like about the food safety consortium and what are opportunities for improvement?

David Hatch: What do I like about the food safety? Consortium. Consortium. Oh, this event.

Matthew Regusci: Yeah.

David Hatch: I like how intimate it is now. When I became involved in this industry, this event was at a very large exhibit hall, trade show style thing, 100 or 200 exhibitors, and it was too much.

The level of conversation and the seniority of the people having those conversations has become much, much better in this format. So that's what I like about it. Even this opportunity to have this conversation was not happening before. Now it is. How could it improve? I don't know. I have to think about that one.

I'll have to think about that

Matthew Regusci: one. Okay, cool. We have, I don't know, 10 more seconds before the interview is over though. So 10 seconds. My

Francine L Shaw: next question, what does trust mean to you? The word trust. What does that mean to you?

David Hatch: Trust. Oh gosh. We just had a conversation about this with the food defense focus group table at lunch.

And so I'm on one side of the equation. I trust people. Until they unearn it and the person sitting across from me who is a food safety expert and a security cyber security expert is the opposite. She said, I don't trust anyone until they earn it. So to me, trust means everything. Trust. To me means that you have a belief in someone else that they will do something even when nobody is looking, they will do the right thing.

I trust that you will do that because I inherently believe you are a person with integrity and you're a good person and I believe you can trust me in the same way. Um, until experience proves differently, I operate on with that belief of trust.

Francine L Shaw: I wonder, that's a very good answer. I wonder if our jobs have anything to do with the way we answer those questions.

You know what I mean? Because I had a similar question with my son and my daughter in law, it's probably been a year or so ago. My son's an engineer, everything's black and white with a lot of times with engineers and the conversation was people general, in general, honest. It was that type of conversation.

It wasn't really about trust. I wonder if it has to do with what we do for a living and whether things, how much gray area we see, so to speak, or whether things have to be proven or whether or not they have to, if you're scientific or mathematical or personality driven, do you understand what I'm saying?

David Hatch: I totally do. This is going to sound ironic, but. Before this career in food safety, which has not been a very long career for me, I was the chief marketing officer for the Institute for Applied Network Security, a cybersecurity think tank, if you will. I was exposed to some of the most evil, nefarious things.

On earth, not just stealing access to financial records and things that are all about taking money and taking the bank's money. It doesn't seem that bad. I'm talking about things that harmed people greatly, like disrupting a water supply for a municipality. Because the valves for the water system are now controlled by remote servos on a Wi Fi network so you could hack into that and you could actually open the valve to a water treatment plant that shouldn't be opened.

So there's horrible things that people are out there doing. So you think I would not be a trusting person after being exposed to that for years. But then I saw all the people involved in trying to help organizations. to protect people, and it renewed my trust in humanity. It renews it, because you see people who are altruistic, who are doing things because they're just passionate about helping people.

It's what drew me into, I spent a long time in healthcare, and looking at physician scorecarding and treatment programs and the efficacy of healthcare providers ability to deliver true outcomes that save people's lives. And the analytics behind that, right? And now I'm in this world of food safety in very much the same way.

Using data, using analytics to try to help people has renewed my sense of trust, renewed my sense of, you know, people are inherently good. So trust is like a bucket for you that just needs to be filled occasionally. Bingo. It's like the battery in my hybrid car, just recharge that sucker so I can make it down to the grocery store.

See, I

Francine L Shaw: would, I'm kind of similar. I would think with my personal. background, you would think that I wouldn't trust easily. You know what I mean? I've been one of those people that doesn't trust, but I'm like you, I trust until I find out that I can't. Now, once I can't, I'm done. But I am very trusting and I will trust somebody until I find out that I can't.

David Hatch: I just find it to be more efficient. It's much easier. I have far fewer issues going on in my head about questioning what you're saying. I don't have to question it, you know, until you, and you really got to hit me over the head with it. You know, you really got to disappoint me for me to realize it. Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: Sometimes you don't get a sense or a feeling from, so it's in general.

David Hatch: Yeah.

Francine L Shaw: You know,

David Hatch: I bring that back to, to food safety mindsets. Remember the lean in, lean out. Theory, right? Yeah. It was the COO of Facebook who taught us the lean in, right? Well, I apply it to food safety. I meet a lot of lean in food safety folks who realize we have to do testing.

We have to find and destroy any of these contaminants that are going to be harmful to people. Even if it costs me more to do that, it's always less costly than the potential end result of, and the worst they always think of is a recall. And I say, or Actually harming someone and there's so many lean in people now when I first got involved and this was just five years ago I met a fair amount of lean out.

Oh my gosh, we're not testing if we test for that and we find it Do you know what happens? Oh, no, I don't want to see that head in the sand. I don't want to see that. You don't hear that anymore So something there's been a groundswell something has happened that has caused the lean in to be the norm now And the majority of people I I encounter one of

Matthew Regusci: those You Maybe that testing technology has gotten so good we can find the genetic markers and know exactly where I say this all the time because Frank Giannis said this and it just hit me so hard where he's we could find the needle we now we need to find the haystack and if that needle is leading to your haystack they've already found that needle now they're just searching for that haystack and if it is your facility that is not a good thing.

David Hatch: We have a big genetics lab at Neogen and the work we're doing there. Is exactly along those lines and now we're going upstream and we're looking into because the other half of neogen's business I haven't even mentioned i'm on the food safety side There's the animal safety and protection side and there we're looking at you've got a herd of cattle And they're milk producing cattle.

You want them to be producing milk. That's healthy. You want those cattle to be healthy And if you can start to to look at the full Genotyping of those cattle you can start to understand. Okay, what disease are they likely to contract? What are they susceptible to? What are they resistant to? What type of inoculations are going to work or not work?

And you start to care for these cattle in a meaningful way where the end result is not just healthier cattle, it's safer food. So we're looking upstream as well. I know we mentioned before, I'm concerned with what happens in the processing plants, but our organization is concerned across the entire supply chain of food.

And as a

Matthew Regusci: data. It gets better and better, faster and moves faster and faster. Then the analytics of that becomes richer and richer. And that's where we are going to be moving to in the future,

David Hatch: huh? That's our vision. Our vision is that through digital technology in the cloud, you can connect that data together and you can make it.

And the reason I say the cloud, you can make it available wherever people are who need it. Right. It's not just I got to go to this machine in the plant and look at the readout that those days are gone. I can't believe I'm even still saying that. It still goes on.

Matthew Regusci: Right.

David Hatch: Those days are gone in every other industry I've experienced, but they're still here in food.

So we're trying to improve the bar. Much higher.

Matthew Regusci: Well, David, this was a fantastic interview. Thank you so much. And we have one piece of advice for you. Don't eat poop. I was skipping

David Hatch: through the hallways last night saying I'm going to be on Donnie poop. It's the coolest name of a podcast I've ever heard.

So congratulations. Thank you so much, David. Thank you guys.