7 ms·

Food safety in processed foods in the USA is a major issue, and the fact is, preventing microbial contamination in the pipeline leading from raw ingredients to

Food safety in processed foods in the USA is a major issue, and the fact is, preventing microbial contamination in the pipeline leading from raw ingredients to final product is an expensive proposition. To have any chance of catching problems before they hit the public, you really need an onsite QA lab capable of doing microbial contamination tests (and heavy metal contamination tests) at every step of the process. In-house labs are notoriously subject to corporate pressure to pass product through (consider the expense of having to toss an entire production run), and this leads to the promotion of those who don't back up production by waving red flags when product fails tests. One solution is aggressive testing and auditing by the FDA, i.e. swooping in and grabbing samples of product, but this is where political pressure to deregulate industries comes into play, and again, anyone at the FDA promoting this approach won't get promoted up the government ladder. Another solution might be legislation requiring independent accredited labs to be involved in the testing process, but again you can have massive problems here as the labs that pass questionable product are the ones who get their contracts renewed. It's probably the best option - but my advice is to just avoid highly processed foods as much as possible.

dpierce9 5y ago
If you need baby formula you can’t avoid baby formula. Not all mothers can or want to breast feed. Mothers are not always available when babies need to be fed. Any supply chain for secondary breast milk is going to have similar contamination and cold chain management issues.
- ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
  > Not all mothers can or want to breast feed. Those that don't want to should probably reconsider having kids. > Mothers are not always available when babies need to be fed. This is why pumps exist. No problem. > Any supply chain for secondary breast milk is going to have similar contamination and cold chain management issues. It's often frozen.
  - leaflets2 5y ago
    Agree, And I wonder, how does it matter if the milk is frozen? (Can't they put it in the micro? I guess I'm misunderstanding something)
  - Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
    "> Not all mothers can or want to breast feed. Those that don't want to should probably reconsider having kids." How well does that work for their first baby if it's some unanticipated problem the mother has?? Modern civilization starting with agriculture is also a repudiation of the "survival of the fittest" philosophy you're pushing.
    - ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
      Problems are not a lack of desire. I didn't address "can't" for exactly that reason: if you tried and it didn't work out, then of course it's a valid reason to feed formula.
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    Those are pretty naive and shortsighted views. Some women simply can’t breastfeed, and don’t discover that until the baby is born. Milk doesn’t always come in, feeding can be painful, etc. Some babies are orphans. You gonna pump a corpse? Or force the child on some other new mother?
    - ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
      You apparently didn't notice that I didn't address "can't", and the reason I didn't is because it's absolutely a valid reason to feed formula.
      - dpierce9 4y ago
        Not wanting to breastfeed is also a good reason. First, breastfeeding and/or pumping is a lot of work. Second, it can be painful for a number of reasons (latching, chafing, engorgement). Third, women have jobs and the US has horrendous parental leave policies. It can be nearly impossible to breastfeed/pump AND do your job. Fourth, it isn’t your kid so it isn’t your choice how to feed them. If you want to breastfeed your kids that is fine. Many women do hybrid. Some don’t do any breast milk. You have provided no good reasons to think your position on this is correct and you have said a number of other things which are just reprehensible. I am only responding because I hope you will see this.
- PolygonSheep 4y ago
  I'm no expert on infant nutrition but why wouldn't cow milk and/or goat milk be an acceptable substitute? They're both safe for humans to consume, they're widely available at fairly low cost. They provide enough nutrition to get large animals growing. It may not be scientifically 100% "perfect" but why wouldn't it be "close enough"?
  - p_l 4y ago
    Look up history of alternatives to breastfeeding. Cow/goat milk has been used as portion of various recipes, and I think cow milk is one of usual inputs in formula making, but it's not enough on its own and could get contaminated etc. Not to mention other mammals have different micro and macro element needs than humans. But formula is effectively a safer and more filling endpoint of improvements that started with animal milk and some other foods.
    - PolygonSheep 4y ago
      I get that formula is better, and should be the #1 choice but in a formula shortage/emergency situation would most babies be seriously harmed by using goat milk instead?
      - p_l 4y ago
        I suspect the end result would be similar to why me and my two siblings had to be put on formula - malnutrition. Goat milk simply is not going to have all the elements that a human baby needs, so I'd consider it somewhere closer to "last resort" rather than "oh well, not enough formula, let's grab goat milk". Doable, but only because it's emergency.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Goat's milk was the historical alternative, since it's a close match. We don't have a lot of goats, nor a lot milking of them. But my wife's grandfather was in fact fed on goat's milk when he was young. Cow's milk is absolutely inappropriate [1]: it has way too much protein for babies and the wrong nutritional profile - even when they start being able to drink it you have to be careful about how much since they're not great at digesting it yet. It's missing all sorts of things - i.e. not enough iron. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4882692/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4882692/
TimPC 5y ago
This assumes you even try. The US allows for relatively large amount of some heavy metals in baby formula and as a result parents have to be especially careful about certain brands with high heavy metal content.
- recursive 5y ago
  I finished the formula years recently. I had never heard of this. I'm assuming I fed my kids some heavy metal. Do you have a source for this?
  - beamatronic 5y ago
    https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/heavy-metals-in-baby-food-a6772370847/ https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/heavy-metals-in-...
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      I'm not seeing baby formula in this document. I do see baby foods.
    - phdelightful 5y ago
      The word “formula” doesn’t appear in the article you linked. It seems to be about other baby foods.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    I tried to find my source but I’m no longer able to successfully google it. I do remember the worst offenders were big box chain fake-organic brands like “Earth’s Best”.
- Victerius 5y ago
  Making babies listen to heavy metal, on the other hand...
  - wombatpm 5y ago
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
What should be done is change laws around class action lawsuits so lawyers representing the public are incentivized to get higher payouts instead of settling early and taking a huge cut. That would solve a lot more problems without requiring an expanded role for a regulatory agency that is subject to regulatory capture.
- Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
  In civil suits US courts really, really want you to settle early.
- hedora 5y ago
  Yeah; there should be a floor on settlements of statutory fines + 1.5x damages being paid out to each member of the class, with money set asside assuming 100% claim rate. Excess money would go to a relevant non-profit of a judge's choosing.
  - nradov 5y ago
    In most class action lawsuits, the actual damages are a total guess and almost impossible to quantify in any legally consistent manner. Pick a number.
- enragedcacti 5y ago
  While I'm not opposed to changes to laws surrounding class action lawsuits, it seems inadvisable for a society's plan A to require waiting for babies to get poisoned or starve to death before it can take action. Of course you could argue that the threat of meaningful class action is a check against it happening in the first place, but profits from illegal activities are quarterly and the punishment will be a decade away. If anything is consistent in the US, its that we can't rely on enough executives to act morally or with long-term interests in mind when their compensation hinges on them not doing so.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  A big problem is that many of the big class actions are on shaky ground and it’s actually advantageous to settle rather than go through the motions and lose. After all, the company is offering you $100M not because they’re wrong, but just to get you to go away. Why not take it rather than risk losing it all? Not all class actions are like that, but a lot are.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
notreallyserio 5y ago
If you make the punishment for passing hazardous product high enough you could make a dent. Send the C-suite to jail if they cut enough corners that infants die -- you'll probably see a lot of improvements very quickly. Money fines won't be enough and are a complete waste of time and human life. It still won't be perfect, but we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
- incone123 5y ago
  China executed people for this years ago and I think public trust in the product has yet to recover http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8375638.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8375638.stm
  - wonnage 5y ago
    Probably because it’s like playing whack a mole, executing a few scapegoats isn’t going to fix the lack of regulatory oversight
    - supertrope 5y ago
      And since real reform would likely require regime change, activists outraged over the latest problem (train derailment, buildings not meeting earthquake code due to fraud, etc) go to jail for disrupting social harmony.
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    I've read elsewhere in expat forums that PRC citizen parents with infants visiting the US will load up big parts of their luggage allowance on the return trip with formula. Costco is their favorite store to use. They similarly trust the US-branded formula sold from Costco in the PRC. The general supply chain QA and integrity US citizens take for granted domestically cannot be overstated as an important differentiator until you've traveled extensively around the world. US and EU supply chain integrity problems are nothing compared to many parts of the world.
    - 4y ago
nradov 5y ago
I generally agree, but there have also been many incidents of bacterial contamination from unprocessed foods like lettuce. https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/communication/leafy-greens.html#outbreaks https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/communication/leafy-greens.ht...
Manuel_D 5y ago
I wonder if gamma rays could help this. It kills germs without affecting the nutrition of the food (as opposed to heat, which often does break down nutrients).
- undersuit 5y ago
  You have to figure out where to best use the radiation. Example: gamma rays would kill Clostridium botulinum but not detoxify the botulinum toxin.
- madengr 5y ago
captainmuon 5y ago
I never understand how people in large companies would be motivated do anything immoral or against the law. If you are an individual entrepreneur and stand to gain something from it, sure. But if you are just a cog in the machine, you just work strictly to contract and regulation, and don't go out of your way to do something illegal just to help the company. That would not just be against my self interest, but in fact against my whole professional ethos. It is really surprizing that stakeholders manage to create that kind of pressure in corporations. Maybe what is needed are much stonger labour laws, so that if you actually stand up to your boss, they cannot just fire you the next day.
- tomp 5y ago
  In large companies it's much easier. As an individual entrepreneur, you're the sole decision maker and responsible for everything. In a large company, you can always blame someone else, your boss, your employee, the HR guidelines, the unclear safety guidelines, the shareholders, boss implied you should ignore the law, ... there's often conflicting formal (e.g. "compliance training") and informal (e.g. promotion/commission) incentives as well.
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    If you are just a cog in the machine, it's more likely that you need to protect the status quo in order to insure your own daily employment. Since you would be subject to much more distress upon loss of your job than those higher up the food chain.
tremon 5y ago
Another solution might be legislation requiring independent accredited labs to be involved in the testing process, but again you can have massive problems here as the labs that pass questionable product are the ones who get their contracts renewed. Here's a suggestion: companies are allowed to use in-house testing, but as soon as defective/substandard products are found in the market, the company loses its in-house testing license and must have its products validated by external agencies. Only after X number of years/batches/volume of fault-free product can a company request to reinstate its in-house testing license. And those external agencies may charge whatever they want, of course. And if a competitor finds a fault in an agency's testing procedures, they win said agency's existing contracts. That model creates all the adversarial business relations that small-government aficionados seem to salivate over, I think.
chaosbutters314 5y ago
uh no. I'm a food engineer for one of the largest manufacturers in America and there isn't any pressure from corporate to just pass lines that might be dangerous. the problem is in testing and just how statistically unfeasible it is. case in point, we had a line that passed every QA test but we would still get back 1 product every now and then from a customer with spoilage. we'd test thousands of samples each year and they're all fine but still something was the problem. on top of that, we had "nearly identical" lines that never had any problem. luckily we found the problem in the line and how to push the failures alway the way down to zero for little cost instead of corporate wanting to pay $10 million to fix it. so no, corporate isn't some boogy man.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  SRE folks really should be speaking with engineers like you. I'd love to spend a few months crawling in and around the QA problems your industry faces in production, and how your industry tackles it. There are many echoes of only-happens-at-scale and statistical quality control that software folks think are the first time anyone has ever solved, but are really process engineering problems old hands in industries like yours have long since codified into practices. This is part of the reason I like going on factory tours and see "How It's Made". The US lost a hell of a lot more than the ability to make goods when we shipped off our manufacturing infrastructure. We lost the capacity to cross-fertilize between industries and create compounding innovation effects. If you can share as many interesting stories of production line QA as hits your whimsy in as much detail as you care to share, it would be greatly appreciated.
yourapostasy 4y ago
What are the minimum USD capital and operating costs of a non-accredited lab that is as automated as possible, and does absolutely nothing but test random batch samples of formula 24x7x365? Crowdsource/co-op the funding of such a lab, those who fund it get the results first, and choose their own private, independent decisions based upon those results. Route around the damage caused by lobbying and regulatory capture, and own up to self-policing of quality instead of relying upon accreditation and the agency problem of running a for-profit QA lab constantly bidding upon contracts.
- XorNot 4y ago
  If you were going this path, I'd say you're not thinking big enough. In rice packaging for example, literally every single grain is inspected: there's an automated imaging system which analyses the grains as they are fired through the air by air pressure, and a deflector system which emits a puff of air to kick rejected grains into the discard pile - literally grain by grain. We should be trying to do this for everything, but formula in particular: ideally tin-by-tin we would be testing samples and barcoding the accreditation data onto them. That's the challenge here.
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    That's awesome, I love hearing about applied technology like that, thank you! I wonder what they do with the discard pile? Contaminated soil, use of pesticides containing dangerous metals, and leaching from manufacturing equipment and packaging are the main sources of heavy metals in baby formula. We should be testing those aspects like soil down to the per square meter samples, production line sampling, and packaging sampling, all as an integral part of the supply chain quality assurance process. The better testing methodologies for heavy metals in food are atomic absorption spectrophotometry (AAS), inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES), or inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the operational details to understand whether those methodologies can be packaged into a reliable, accurate, precise miniaturized form factor aimed specifically at testing formula to simplify the sampling aspects. I imagine sampling contamination might be a big issue with a miniaturized tester, along with an entire host of other challenges. There might even be limits of physics I'm unaware of that entirely prohibit miniaturization; the test equipment I'm aware of are benchtop at best in size, not handheld with maybe a smartphone front-end (to leave a screen out of the BOM).

dpierce9 5y ago

If you need baby formula you can’t avoid baby formula. Not all mothers can or want to breast feed. Mothers are not always available when babies need to be fed. Any supply chain for secondary breast milk is going to have similar contamination and cold chain management issues.

ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
> Not all mothers can or want to breast feed. Those that don't want to should probably reconsider having kids. > Mothers are not always available when babies need to be fed. This is why pumps exist. No problem. > Any supply chain for secondary breast milk is going to have similar contamination and cold chain management issues. It's often frozen.
- leaflets2 5y ago
  Agree, And I wonder, how does it matter if the milk is frozen? (Can't they put it in the micro? I guess I'm misunderstanding something)
- Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
  "> Not all mothers can or want to breast feed. Those that don't want to should probably reconsider having kids." How well does that work for their first baby if it's some unanticipated problem the mother has?? Modern civilization starting with agriculture is also a repudiation of the "survival of the fittest" philosophy you're pushing.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
    Problems are not a lack of desire. I didn't address "can't" for exactly that reason: if you tried and it didn't work out, then of course it's a valid reason to feed formula.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  Those are pretty naive and shortsighted views. Some women simply can’t breastfeed, and don’t discover that until the baby is born. Milk doesn’t always come in, feeding can be painful, etc. Some babies are orphans. You gonna pump a corpse? Or force the child on some other new mother?
  - ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
    You apparently didn't notice that I didn't address "can't", and the reason I didn't is because it's absolutely a valid reason to feed formula.
    - dpierce9 4y ago
      Not wanting to breastfeed is also a good reason. First, breastfeeding and/or pumping is a lot of work. Second, it can be painful for a number of reasons (latching, chafing, engorgement). Third, women have jobs and the US has horrendous parental leave policies. It can be nearly impossible to breastfeed/pump AND do your job. Fourth, it isn’t your kid so it isn’t your choice how to feed them. If you want to breastfeed your kids that is fine. Many women do hybrid. Some don’t do any breast milk. You have provided no good reasons to think your position on this is correct and you have said a number of other things which are just reprehensible. I am only responding because I hope you will see this.
PolygonSheep 4y ago
I'm no expert on infant nutrition but why wouldn't cow milk and/or goat milk be an acceptable substitute? They're both safe for humans to consume, they're widely available at fairly low cost. They provide enough nutrition to get large animals growing. It may not be scientifically 100% "perfect" but why wouldn't it be "close enough"?
- p_l 4y ago
  Look up history of alternatives to breastfeeding. Cow/goat milk has been used as portion of various recipes, and I think cow milk is one of usual inputs in formula making, but it's not enough on its own and could get contaminated etc. Not to mention other mammals have different micro and macro element needs than humans. But formula is effectively a safer and more filling endpoint of improvements that started with animal milk and some other foods.
  - PolygonSheep 4y ago
    I get that formula is better, and should be the #1 choice but in a formula shortage/emergency situation would most babies be seriously harmed by using goat milk instead?
    - p_l 4y ago
      I suspect the end result would be similar to why me and my two siblings had to be put on formula - malnutrition. Goat milk simply is not going to have all the elements that a human baby needs, so I'd consider it somewhere closer to "last resort" rather than "oh well, not enough formula, let's grab goat milk". Doable, but only because it's emergency.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Goat's milk was the historical alternative, since it's a close match. We don't have a lot of goats, nor a lot milking of them. But my wife's grandfather was in fact fed on goat's milk when he was young. Cow's milk is absolutely inappropriate [1]: it has way too much protein for babies and the wrong nutritional profile - even when they start being able to drink it you have to be careful about how much since they're not great at digesting it yet. It's missing all sorts of things - i.e. not enough iron. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4882692/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4882692/

TimPC 5y ago

This assumes you even try. The US allows for relatively large amount of some heavy metals in baby formula and as a result parents have to be especially careful about certain brands with high heavy metal content.

recursive 5y ago
I finished the formula years recently. I had never heard of this. I'm assuming I fed my kids some heavy metal. Do you have a source for this?
- beamatronic 5y ago
  https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/heavy-metals-in-baby-food-a6772370847/ https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/heavy-metals-in-...
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    I'm not seeing baby formula in this document. I do see baby foods.
  - phdelightful 5y ago
    The word “formula” doesn’t appear in the article you linked. It seems to be about other baby foods.
- TimPC 4y ago
  I tried to find my source but I’m no longer able to successfully google it. I do remember the worst offenders were big box chain fake-organic brands like “Earth’s Best”.
Victerius 5y ago
Making babies listen to heavy metal, on the other hand...
- wombatpm 5y ago

ErikVandeWater 5y ago

What should be done is change laws around class action lawsuits so lawyers representing the public are incentivized to get higher payouts instead of settling early and taking a huge cut. That would solve a lot more problems without requiring an expanded role for a regulatory agency that is subject to regulatory capture.

Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
In civil suits US courts really, really want you to settle early.
hedora 5y ago
Yeah; there should be a floor on settlements of statutory fines + 1.5x damages being paid out to each member of the class, with money set asside assuming 100% claim rate. Excess money would go to a relevant non-profit of a judge's choosing.
- nradov 5y ago
  In most class action lawsuits, the actual damages are a total guess and almost impossible to quantify in any legally consistent manner. Pick a number.
enragedcacti 5y ago
While I'm not opposed to changes to laws surrounding class action lawsuits, it seems inadvisable for a society's plan A to require waiting for babies to get poisoned or starve to death before it can take action. Of course you could argue that the threat of meaningful class action is a check against it happening in the first place, but profits from illegal activities are quarterly and the punishment will be a decade away. If anything is consistent in the US, its that we can't rely on enough executives to act morally or with long-term interests in mind when their compensation hinges on them not doing so.
colejohnson66 5y ago
A big problem is that many of the big class actions are on shaky ground and it’s actually advantageous to settle rather than go through the motions and lose. After all, the company is offering you $100M not because they’re wrong, but just to get you to go away. Why not take it rather than risk losing it all? Not all class actions are like that, but a lot are.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

notreallyserio 5y ago

If you make the punishment for passing hazardous product high enough you could make a dent. Send the C-suite to jail if they cut enough corners that infants die -- you'll probably see a lot of improvements very quickly. Money fines won't be enough and are a complete waste of time and human life. It still won't be perfect, but we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

incone123 5y ago
China executed people for this years ago and I think public trust in the product has yet to recover http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8375638.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8375638.stm
- wonnage 5y ago
  Probably because it’s like playing whack a mole, executing a few scapegoats isn’t going to fix the lack of regulatory oversight
  - supertrope 5y ago
    And since real reform would likely require regime change, activists outraged over the latest problem (train derailment, buildings not meeting earthquake code due to fraud, etc) go to jail for disrupting social harmony.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  I've read elsewhere in expat forums that PRC citizen parents with infants visiting the US will load up big parts of their luggage allowance on the return trip with formula. Costco is their favorite store to use. They similarly trust the US-branded formula sold from Costco in the PRC. The general supply chain QA and integrity US citizens take for granted domestically cannot be overstated as an important differentiator until you've traveled extensively around the world. US and EU supply chain integrity problems are nothing compared to many parts of the world.
  - 4y ago

nradov 5y ago

I generally agree, but there have also been many incidents of bacterial contamination from unprocessed foods like lettuce. https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/communication/leafy-greens.html#outbreaks https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/communication/leafy-greens.ht...

Manuel_D 5y ago

I wonder if gamma rays could help this. It kills germs without affecting the nutrition of the food (as opposed to heat, which often does break down nutrients).

undersuit 5y ago
You have to figure out where to best use the radiation. Example: gamma rays would kill Clostridium botulinum but not detoxify the botulinum toxin.
madengr 5y ago

captainmuon 5y ago

I never understand how people in large companies would be motivated do anything immoral or against the law. If you are an individual entrepreneur and stand to gain something from it, sure. But if you are just a cog in the machine, you just work strictly to contract and regulation, and don't go out of your way to do something illegal just to help the company. That would not just be against my self interest, but in fact against my whole professional ethos. It is really surprizing that stakeholders manage to create that kind of pressure in corporations. Maybe what is needed are much stonger labour laws, so that if you actually stand up to your boss, they cannot just fire you the next day.

tomp 5y ago
In large companies it's much easier. As an individual entrepreneur, you're the sole decision maker and responsible for everything. In a large company, you can always blame someone else, your boss, your employee, the HR guidelines, the unclear safety guidelines, the shareholders, boss implied you should ignore the law, ... there's often conflicting formal (e.g. "compliance training") and informal (e.g. promotion/commission) incentives as well.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  If you are just a cog in the machine, it's more likely that you need to protect the status quo in order to insure your own daily employment. Since you would be subject to much more distress upon loss of your job than those higher up the food chain.

tremon 5y ago

Another solution might be legislation requiring independent accredited labs to be involved in the testing process, but again you can have massive problems here as the labs that pass questionable product are the ones who get their contracts renewed. Here's a suggestion: companies are allowed to use in-house testing, but as soon as defective/substandard products are found in the market, the company loses its in-house testing license and must have its products validated by external agencies. Only after X number of years/batches/volume of fault-free product can a company request to reinstate its in-house testing license. And those external agencies may charge whatever they want, of course. And if a competitor finds a fault in an agency's testing procedures, they win said agency's existing contracts. That model creates all the adversarial business relations that small-government aficionados seem to salivate over, I think.

chaosbutters314 5y ago

uh no. I'm a food engineer for one of the largest manufacturers in America and there isn't any pressure from corporate to just pass lines that might be dangerous. the problem is in testing and just how statistically unfeasible it is. case in point, we had a line that passed every QA test but we would still get back 1 product every now and then from a customer with spoilage. we'd test thousands of samples each year and they're all fine but still something was the problem. on top of that, we had "nearly identical" lines that never had any problem. luckily we found the problem in the line and how to push the failures alway the way down to zero for little cost instead of corporate wanting to pay $10 million to fix it. so no, corporate isn't some boogy man.

yourapostasy 4y ago
SRE folks really should be speaking with engineers like you. I'd love to spend a few months crawling in and around the QA problems your industry faces in production, and how your industry tackles it. There are many echoes of only-happens-at-scale and statistical quality control that software folks think are the first time anyone has ever solved, but are really process engineering problems old hands in industries like yours have long since codified into practices. This is part of the reason I like going on factory tours and see "How It's Made". The US lost a hell of a lot more than the ability to make goods when we shipped off our manufacturing infrastructure. We lost the capacity to cross-fertilize between industries and create compounding innovation effects. If you can share as many interesting stories of production line QA as hits your whimsy in as much detail as you care to share, it would be greatly appreciated.

yourapostasy 4y ago

What are the minimum USD capital and operating costs of a non-accredited lab that is as automated as possible, and does absolutely nothing but test random batch samples of formula 24x7x365? Crowdsource/co-op the funding of such a lab, those who fund it get the results first, and choose their own private, independent decisions based upon those results. Route around the damage caused by lobbying and regulatory capture, and own up to self-policing of quality instead of relying upon accreditation and the agency problem of running a for-profit QA lab constantly bidding upon contracts.

XorNot 4y ago
If you were going this path, I'd say you're not thinking big enough. In rice packaging for example, literally every single grain is inspected: there's an automated imaging system which analyses the grains as they are fired through the air by air pressure, and a deflector system which emits a puff of air to kick rejected grains into the discard pile - literally grain by grain. We should be trying to do this for everything, but formula in particular: ideally tin-by-tin we would be testing samples and barcoding the accreditation data onto them. That's the challenge here.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  That's awesome, I love hearing about applied technology like that, thank you! I wonder what they do with the discard pile? Contaminated soil, use of pesticides containing dangerous metals, and leaching from manufacturing equipment and packaging are the main sources of heavy metals in baby formula. We should be testing those aspects like soil down to the per square meter samples, production line sampling, and packaging sampling, all as an integral part of the supply chain quality assurance process. The better testing methodologies for heavy metals in food are atomic absorption spectrophotometry (AAS), inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES), or inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the operational details to understand whether those methodologies can be packaged into a reliable, accurate, precise miniaturized form factor aimed specifically at testing formula to simplify the sampling aspects. I imagine sampling contamination might be a big issue with a miniaturized tester, along with an entire host of other challenges. There might even be limits of physics I'm unaware of that entirely prohibit miniaturization; the test equipment I'm aware of are benchtop at best in size, not handheld with maybe a smartphone front-end (to leave a screen out of the BOM).