rs, an Ohio bakery, and a New York dairy farm are among the food companies receiving recent warning letters from the U.S Food and Drug Administration. FDA district offices in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco sent warning letters for the four seafood companies.Caito Fisheries Inc. in Fort Bragg, CA, was inspected by FDA on Feb. 24-26,2014, and was found to have serious violations causing its Dungeness crab to be adulterated. Specific violations involve the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) regulations. The company does not have a HACCP for receiving cooked crab from San Francisco to control the food safety hazard of pathogen growth.
FDA on March 26 to 31, 2014, inspected Sea Fex Inc., doing business as Seafood Express, in Telford, PA. It also was found with significant violations, mostly involving HACCP issues regarding its ready-to-eat canned, refrigerated and pasteurized crabmeat.
FDA inspected Galil Importing Corp., a Syosset, NY, seafood importing facility, on March 27 through April 1, 2014, and found that it had serious HACCP violations. Specifically, the company did not apply HACCP regulations to ready-to-eat canned sardines in vegetable oil and ready-to-eat canned sardines in olive oil.
Eddies Place, doing business as Esther Kwakyewa, is a seafood importer in the Bronx, NY. The business was subjected to FDA inspection from Jan. 2-7, 2014. The inspectors found smoked fish herring and salted fish and fried fish imported into the country were not being processed in accordance with seafood HACCP regulations.
FDA inspected Cho & So Inc.’s Oh Bok Bakery in Philadelphia on Oct. 24-25, 2013. FDA inspectors identified serious violations there, including failures to control pests, clean food contact surfaces, clean equipment and utensils, and clean and sanitize. In addition, there were plumbing and lighting problems, and Korean cake was also misbranded.
Gallagher Farms LLC, a dairy farm in Deansboro, NY, was warned about drug residues found in a cow it sold for slaughter as food. In part, the warning letter to the dairy farm stated: “analysis of tissue samples collected from this animal identified the presence of tilmicosin at 1.967 parts per million (ppm) in the liver. FDA has established a tolerance of 1.2 ppm for residues of tilmicosin in the liver tissues of cattle as codified in Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.), Section 556.735 (21 C.F.R. 556.735). However, this tolerance does not apply to the use of (b)(4) (tilmicosin injection) NADA (b)(4), in female dairy cattle 20 months of age or older, and there is no acceptable level of residue associated with the use of this drug in female dairy cattle 20 months of age or older.”
