At a Glance
- Foodborne illnesses can enter the supply chain at nearly any point, from growing and processing to transportation, retail, and foodservice.
- Raw and multi-ingredient foods can create additional risks because there may be no cooking step and contamination can be harder to trace.
- Strong hazard analysis, supplier oversight, sanitation, and temperature control can help food businesses reduce contamination risks.
- Packaging supports a broader food safety strategy through product protection, tamper evidence, labeling, and traceability.
Nobody wakes up excited to talk about Cyclospora or the Norovirus. In fact, most people don’t wake up to “talk” about it, but to “deal” with it. (Yikes!)
But if you run a food business, you don’t get to opt out of the conversation, especially with headlines about outbreaks popping up every few months like an unwelcome houseguest.
Inline Plastics recently sat down with Gretchen Wall, Senior Director of Food Safety at Food Safety Strategy, LLC, to talk through the real challenges (and opportunities) of managing food safety risks from the field to the dinner table. With years spent training growers, regulators, and educators, she’s seen firsthand where things go right and where they go sideways.
Inline Plastics has spent over 55 years providing packaging solutions for fresh food businesses, so this topic isn’t academic nonsense for us either. We’ve watched the industry evolve, and we know that good packaging is one piece of a much bigger food safety puzzle; while not the whole answer, but an important part.
In this article, we’ll walk through what actually causes foodborne illness, where contamination sneaks into the supply chain, and what both businesses and consumers can realistically do about it, without needing a microbiology degree to follow along.
What Are the Most Common Foodborne Illnesses?
Norovirus usually tops the list, mostly because it spreads person-to-person and can transmit pretty easily. (Think shaking hands with someone after they’ve left the restroom without sanitation…and we apologize for the mental image.)
The CDC backs this up nationally: Each year, an estimated 48 million people in the U.S. get sick from a foodborne illness, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die, with Norovirus and Salmonella leading the pack among known causes.
Zooming in on produce specifically, a 2019 peer-reviewed study found 85 multistate outbreaks tied to fresh produce between 2010 and 2017, causing 4,658 illnesses, 1,187 hospitalizations, and 55 deaths — with Salmonella responsible for 67.5% of those outbreaks, followed by E. coli (27.4%) and Listeria monocytogenes (4.8%).
Where Does Contamination Actually Start?
Here’s the blunt version: Most foodborne pathogens come from…well…feces. Human or animal, it doesn’t discriminate. Pathogens live in guts and find their way onto food, sometimes directly and sometimes through a chain of small missteps (Do not panic, just keep reading.)
For fresh produce specifically, the Frontiers review lays out the usual suspects: Contaminated irrigation water, improperly treated manure, nearby livestock or wildlife, and even insects and airborne dust. One study cited in the review found E. coli O157:H7 could travel from a cattle feedlot to leafy greens fields up to 180 meters away, carried by nothing more than the wind.
Where in the Supply Chain Is Contamination Most Likely to Happen?
Short answer: Anywhere. Contamination can be introduced at the farm through water or soil, during processing if equipment isn’t properly sanitized, or at retail and foodservice if hygiene practices slip. And once contamination is present, problems can get worse during transit if proper temperatures aren’t maintained.
The research backs this up. The Frontiers review points to cross-contamination during distribution and poor agricultural practices as common contributors to outbreaks that grow into multistate events.
Why Are Some Foods Riskier Than Others?
Whether a food will be cooked or eaten raw is one important factor, but where and how it grows matters too. Produce grown close to the ground, like lettuce, may come into contact with soil amendments or wildlife. Produce grown off the ground faces different risks, including birds and contamination during washing, handling, or other post-harvest steps.
Cooking can kill many pathogens, which gives foods like hard squash an additional layer of protection that a tomato sliced into a salad doesn’t have. Washing produce with clean water is still recommended, but it may not remove all contamination. That’s why preventing contamination throughout the supply chain is so important in the first place.
Multi-ingredient foods add another layer of headache. Think salsa, for instance: You’ve got tomatoes, onions, jalapeños, and cilantro, all mixed and potentially sourced from different suppliers. When someone gets sick, tracing the culprit through salsa is much harder than tracing it through a single-ingredient product like packaged spinach. In fact, it’s harder to find than Carmen Sandiego!
What’s the Biggest Mistake Food Businesses Make?
It’s not skipping handwashing signs in the bathroom. The real gap is a shallow hazard analysis; businesses that say they’ve done one but haven’t actually walked through every ingredient, every processing step, and every point where risk could sneak in.
This is basically the modern version of HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), a framework built into the FDA’s food safety rules that still works because the logic hasn’t changed: Know your product, know your risks, know where you can control them.
Does Better Traceability Actually Prevent Outbreaks?
This one surprises people. Traceability doesn’t stop contamination in the first place. It’s a tool for damage control — helping you find affected product fast, pull it from shelves, and limit how many people get sick.
That lines up with why the FDA built its Food Traceability Rule in the first place. The rule requires businesses handling high-risk foods to keep detailed records so they can identify contaminated products and pull them from the market quickly, resulting in fewer foodborne illnesses and deaths.
That’s exactly why packaging plays a bigger role in food safety than most people give it credit for. Tamper-evident packaging, clear labeling, and batch tracking don’t prevent a pathogen from landing on a strawberry. Still, they make it dramatically easier to trace that strawberry back to its source. Good packaging won’t replace a solid food safety program — but paired with one, it’s a serious asset.
What Can Food Businesses Actually Do to Reduce Risk?
The advice isn’t flashy, but it’s practical:
- Build a real hazard analysis, not a checkbox exercise
- Vet suppliers and ask how they’re managing risk on their end
- Maintain consistent temperature control — it’s time and temperature together that let bacteria multiply
- Keep sanitation programs tight, especially for surfaces and equipment
- Choose packaging that supports traceability and protects product integrity through transport and storage
None of this guarantees zero risk. Nothing does. But it stacks the odds heavily in your favor.
What Can Consumers Do to Prevent Foodborne Illness?
Food safety isn’t a one-way street. Consumers play a role too, and businesses that help them understand that build more trust in the process.
The FDA boils home food safety down to four steps: Clean, separate, cook, and chill. Wash hands and surfaces often, keep raw meat away from produce, cook food to safe internal temperatures, and refrigerate leftovers promptly.
Beyond the basics, personal risk matters too. Consumers who are pregnant, immunocompromised, very young, or elderly face a higher risk of severe illness from the same foods that barely faze everyone else, which is why it’s worth consulting a healthcare provider about which foods make sense for their household. It’s a small step that puts more control back in consumers’ hands, which is exactly the kind of thing food businesses can help promote through clear labeling and honest communication.
The Reassuring Part Nobody Talks About Enough
It’s worth ending on this note: The U.S. has one of the safest food supplies in the world. Outbreaks make headlines because they’re scary, dramatic, and rare, not because they’re common.
Food businesses that take hazard analysis seriously, maintain strong supplier relationships, and use packaging as part of a broader safety strategy aren’t just checking regulatory boxes. Combined with informed consumers doing their part at home, they’re protecting the people who trust them with what goes on their plate and building the kind of reputation that keeps shoppers coming back without tummy troubles.
Are you interested in elements of food safety and packaging? Visit the Inline Plastics Learning Center today and explore a wide variety of topics.
