When looking back at the past few years, former FDA Deputy Commissioner Frank Yiannas says the fresh produce industry still has a lot of work to do when it comes to food safety.
“[2025] was a tough year,” he says. “I said this same thing last year at the end of ‘24. I said, ‘It’s been a tough year for food safety.’”
He notes, however, that the industry seeks continuous improvement.
There have been successes, Yiannas says, highlighting romaine lettuce, but there are still constant recalls and foodborne illnesses, though not all related to fresh produce.
“Just last week, recalls this year are up,” he says. “But more importantly, just the total number of recalls by FDA-regulated products, the number of units is dramatically up; the number of units that are being recalled, almost twice as many.”
So, he says it’s time for the industry to do more.
“There’s certainly a lot that we could say about what’s transpired in ‘25,” he says. “Philosophically and for the organizations I’ve worked with, it’s even more important to look back, but let’s look forward. What should we be doing and planning for ahead?”
Yiannas sat down with The Packer to share his top six food safety concerns for 2026.
1. Know the Risks
Yiannas says that while many growers might think more about the regulations, he says it’s more important to focus on the real risks.
“The first thing you have to do is just rereview your hazard analysis and risk assessments,” he says. “Rereview it, and challenge the assumptions, because what I see is that companies continue to have problems.”
Yiannas says some produce industry businesses have not identified hazards or risks in production or growing. Companies can’t measure what hasn’t been evaluated, he says, adding that this evaluation should be continuous; any existing hazard and risk analysis should continually be challenged to make sure it’s good enough.
“I always say, even if it’s a low probability, high-severity event, I want to think about it,” he says.
It’s also important to remember the relationship between hazard and risk, Yiannas adds. The hazard might be E. coli, but the risk is: How does the produce get exposed to E. coli? Is it adjacent land? Is it irrigation water?
“It seems fairly basic, but I promise you that if companies did a better job with hazard analysis and risk assessments, we’d have less outbreaks,” he says.
2. Rethink Controls
“We have literally what I call a gazillion controls in food safety, but most of the controls are not very good,” Yiannas says. “I don’t believe we bend that curve until we start, what I would say, adopting or utilizing more design or engineering controls.”
He says these controls are designed to manage or reduce hazards, but if those measures rely on administrative controls, that is not a recipe for success.
Yiannas says an example of an administrative control is having an employee check available chlorine in the water four times a day. This relies on the employee performing this control consistently at the same time and conducting the test properly. Whereas, if a produce business automates a control, it reduces the potential for error.
“Clearly, in the 20th century, there was the industrial revolution in the way we grow and farm. They adopted technology and they did things so much differently,” he says. “I think it’s time right now to say, ‘How do we continue to modernize how we produce and harvest products so that it’s more dependent on engineering controls as opposed to administrative or human controls?’
“I would look around those points of harvesting, whether it’s done by people or equipment, and make sure that we have the right food safety considerations there, and certainly water applications, which has been very much traditional and manual,” Yiannas adds. “And in some cases, we haven’t even had controls, right?
3. Have a Laser Focus on Water and Adjacent Land Use
“Water is one of the best conduits to spread contamination, whether it’s indoors or outdoors,” says Yiannas, who notes that, while he was with the FDA, salmonella was found in a nutrient pond of a controlled environment agriculture facility.
What also complicates food safety efforts in modern agriculture production is that there are often many types of farming operations within a location, Yiannas says.
“We have these complex agricultural ecosystems all across the U.S.” he says. “They differ depending on whether you’re in Salinas or Yuma or other states. We need them all to coexist together and safely.”
However, if a grower’s farm is across the field from a neighbor raising livestock, it’s important to consider the risk and the hazards that come with those neighboring farms, Yiannas says.
“The solutions sometimes aren’t easy, especially if they’re upstream, but there are things you can do, whether it’s planting a hedge, a tree or barriers to try to direct the flow of water, but you should think about that,” he says.
4. Continue to Digitize Food Safety
Food safety records on paper should be obsolete, Yiannas says.
“You have it on a piece of paper; it’s a dead end. You can’t automate anything. You can’t trend and compare. You can’t evaluate it in totality with other data, but food safety data in digital form is the beginning of what I call meaningful action,” he says. “You can trend and compare long-term. You can trend and compare with other data sources that might be relevant.”
Yiannas says technology helps an operation bridge the gap between data and powerful information. While the fresh produce industry may have a wealth of data, it lacks actionable information, he says — and for food safety, it offers immense potential for data analysis.
“I think [in] the year 2026, every food producer, regardless of the type of food you’re producing, you should be challenging your teams and yourself to say, ‘Maybe we don’t digitize everything overnight. It might be a multiyear journey, but we’ve got to start making the transition,’” he says.
5. Be Ready for Compliance
While the FDA’s Food Traceability Rule does not go into effect until 2028, Yiannas says that is way too long to wait to become compliant. Whether it’s a potential issue with onions or beef, or spinach or other leafy greens, traceability will help prevent food waste and minimize the harm caused to the commodities involved, he says.
“Let’s minimize the damage as opposed to destroying the livelihood of all romaine growers, of all onion growers, of all spinach growers,” Yiannas says. “It pays to have food traceability now.”
He strongly encourages all produce industry businesses to take traceability seriously and work toward FSMA 204.
6. Cultivate a Culture of Food Safety
While Yiannas says he’s known for touting the importance of a top-down culture of food safety, he couldn’t offer a list of food safety concerns without mentioning it.
Food safety culture trumps strategy and planning because, at the heart, it’s about the values and beliefs of the company, he explains.
“I’ve seen enough outbreaks over the course of my career to know that those companies that have strong cultures — they’re doing this just because they really genuinely care about the safety of people,” he says. “And they’re not just trying to protect their brand reputation.”
Yiannas says it’s important for fresh produce businesses to embrace food safety throughout the entire company, in which it’s important to conduct food safety properly every day.
“I am always struck by companies thinking that food safety is a regulatory requirement,” he says. “They have the wrong mindset. Really, food safety is just the right thing to do because we care about consumers.
