Global Food Contact 2020 | Agenda

The Office of Food Additive Safety (OFAS) within the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) reorganized in May 2019 to advance its mission to protect and enhance consumer health by ensuring the safety of substances added to food and food contact materials. The restructuring will streamline OFAS’ operations and allow the Office to better address emerging needs related to new tools and technologies, as well as innovations in food production, such as cell-cultured products. In addition, CFSAN Online Submission Module (COSM) went live in September 2019. COSM is a web-based tool that walks users through a step-by-step process to assemble electronic submissions submitted to the electronic gateway to OFAS, thereby eliminating the need for printing and mailing of paper submissions. This presentation will provide (a) an overview of FDA’s Organizational changes within the OFAS; (b) an overview of COSM; and (c) updated information relevant to future FCN submissions.

In response to their lack of success influencing federal regulators, several non-governmental organizations have been applying pressure to U.S. State governments for increased regulation on some food contact materials. Individual States often have inconsistent and conflicting requirements, leading to compliance problems for nationally marketed foods.

The speaker will present Food Contact Regulations in Canada and program updates including:

• Key Canadian Food Safety Legislation
• Canadian Regulations for Food Packaging Materials (FPMs)
• Premarket Submission Process and a Letter of No Objection
• Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and its role
• Update on FPM Program Review
• The Chemicals Management Plan (CMP)
• Plastics Pollution

In his presentation, Professor Alejandro Ariosti will cover:

• General situation of blocks in Latin America (MERCOSUR, CAN, SICA, etc.)
• MERCOSUR FCMs Legislation compared with the US-FDA, EU, Japan, and China
• MERCOSUR last updates and review of the food contact plastics framework regulation and the positive list of monomers and polymers for food contact plastics (2019-2020)
• Differences between the Argentine and Brazilian pre-market approval systems of final FCMs
• How companies can include new food contact substances in the MERCOSUR positive lists
• Status of post-consumer recycled PET (PCR-PET) in South America

• Cumunidad Andina de Naciones
  • Membership
  • History
  • Harmonization?
• What You Need to Know About the Food Laws of Its Member Nations
  • Colombia – INVIMA Regulations, ICONTEC Certifications, and Technical Standards
  • Bolivia – General Framework + PCR-PET
  • Ecuador – Technical Standards and Registration
  • Peru – Supreme Decrees 7/1998 and 038-2014
• Chile
  • Supreme Decree 977/1996 “Food Sanitary Regulation”
  • “Development of standards and regulations on plastic packaging for food”

This presentation will cover some other lesser known regional entities in Latin America, including Mexico, with the recent country approvals of the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), Trump’s replacement for NAFTA. We will also discuss the Secretariat for Central American Economic Integration (SIECA), its Central American Technical Regulations (RTCA) and member state legislation, and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), as well as individual food contact legislation in those countries.

• Conducting EU and US Risk Assessment
• Process Overview for Declaring Compliance
• NIAS: Toxicology and the Circular Economy

• EU Regulation 10/2011 – The Plastics Implementing Measure (The PIM)
  • Recent and Future Developments
• Progress on Recycling Processes
• The European Commission Review of Food Contact Legislation
  • Which materials could the EU regulate next?
• What impact could Brexit have?

Japan currently has a negative system for food contact materials. This system identifies and regulates substances that are restricted in food contact materials. Under the negative list system, a food contact substance can only be regulated through specifications and standards issued by the government. In cases where there are no applicable requirements, this system essentially allows manufacturers to use substances that are not permitted in other jurisdictions in the food contact materials marketed in Japan. To address this potential safety risk, the Japanese authorities have been holding discussions on the possibility of introducing a positive list system, which would prohibit the use of substances that are not specifically permitted in Japan. This presentation will be focusing on the current state of these discussions and the most significant outcome of these discussions: the proposed positive lists of base polymers and additives.

• Overview of China’s Standards Relating to Food Packaging
• Update on Standards Under Development
• China’s New System for Regulating Drug Packaging Materials

Abstract coming soon!

10-minute update presentation focused solely on recent changes in ASEAN (ASEAN General Guidelines on Food Contact Materials) and its member countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Safe and functional packaging is a fundamental requirement throughout the value chain in order to ensure hygienic and efficient food distribution and minimize waste. Traceability of all raw materials is essential in ensuring product safety. The circular economy is driving the innovation of new materials that are guaranteed food-safe, recyclable, and derived from renewable resources. The paper and board industry is developing new solutions that take into account the increasingly strict global food safety regulations. One example is a non-plastic eco-barrier board that can be recycled alongside regular paper and paperboard. This new fluorochemical-free innovation provides a sustainable alternative to plastics in food and food service packaging and is a valuable weapon in the battle against food waste. Case studies will demonstrate the eco-barrier’s performance in various food end-uses and the role of fresh fiber paperboards in the circular economy.

The need to find value add use for recycled plastic continually increases. A target is to find methods to adequately clean post-consumer-recycle plastic waste (PCR) so that it can be used in food packaging. To that end, the FDA issued a final guidance document in 2006 “Guidance for Industry: Use of Recycled Plastics in Food Packaging (Chemistry Considerations),” setting forth the steps a recycler would need to follow to qualify their cleaning process to receive a letter of no objection (LNO) to use the processed recycled plastic for food contact products. The guidance was issued with PET the primary focus but has been used to attempt to qualify PCR polyolefins also.

This presentation will review the basic procedures set forth in the guidance and share Aspen’s experiences with a wide array of polymers including PET, HDPE, PP, and HDPE/PP via case studies. The contamination process and the analytical chemistry of determining the concentrations of the surrogates in the contaminated plastics and then the same in the process-cleaned plastics will be discussed.

When estimating migration levels of food contact substances (FCS) into food, FDA typically assumes that 1 square inch of single-use packaging material contacts 10 grams of food (1 in2/10 g), equivalent to a food-contact surface area-to-food mass ratio (SA/mF) of 6.45 dm2/kg. However, with the current trends toward consumer preference for convenience foods and technological advances in packaging materials, this value might not be representative of the SA/mF ratios for the wide range of packaged food currently consumed in the U.S. Therefore, we conducted a literature search for publications specifically reporting the SA and food mass for a variety of food and packaging scenarios. We identified publications, all from food and packaging collected in Europe and some results from our laboratories, that reported mF and SA values for various food and packaging scenarios. Using these values, we calculated SA/mF ratios for different food types. Here, we will describe an approach for calculating a weighted mean SA/mF ratio for all packaged food consumed in the U.S. using the SA/mF ratios and food intakes for all food and each food type.

Increasing regulatory requirements around the world affect the entire packaged food value chain. This creates challenges for food brands and players upstream who must grapple with conflicting interests such as transparency requirements, intellectual property protection, and liability risks. As a raw material supplier, Eastman has met these challenges with product and process innovations. We would like to illustrate our commitment to the packaged food industry, and the challenges it faces, with two examples of Eastman innovation.

• In Europe, we have developed approaches to work with the entire value chain to enable safe use of tackifier resins, which have been under significant scrutiny due to their oligomeric nature.
• In North America, California Proposition 65 requires manufacturers to label adhesives that contain trace chemicals, such as styrene. To address concerns surrounding trace chemicals, we are introducing a new tackifier family that does not require Proposition 65 labeling.

• Brief introduction to NOVA Chemicals, its products, and its “Product Safety” function
• Product Safety’s assessment of NOVA’s polymer products against global food contact and chemical control requirements
• Challenges encountered in global food contact compliance assessments
• Developments affecting global polymer sales: new Positive Lists for food contact materials in Japan, MERCOSUR (et al.)
• Approach to customer assurance, and common issues encountered

More and more, businesses are faced with the challenge of responding to consumer concerns dealing with safety, transparency, and sustainability. Just as consumers have shown an increased interest in food ingredients, there is a growing awareness of, and curiosity about food contact materials and what they contain. From what chemicals may be present in different FCMs to “clean packaging” and enforcing safety practices within the supply chain, consumers are more transparency-focused than ever before. In this presentation, a panel of industry insiders will address the most common questions, explore how these concerns and perceptions have changed in recent years, and provide insights into how businesses can respond and innovate for the future.

Featured Panelists Include:

• Ron Osborn – Principal Scientist, Scientific & Regulatory Affairs, Americas R&D, Mars Wrigley
• Andrea G. Ferrenz – Food Law Counsel, Legal Department, Campbell Soup Company
• Jeff Plank – Senior Manager, Corporate Quality, Land O’Lakes

Details coming soon!