Food Facilities Registration Deadline is this Friday, December 12

IDFA strongly urges all member companies to make sure that they are in compliance with the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) new biosecurity regulations regarding facility registration by the deadline of December 12, 2003. FDA has reportedly received a significantly lower number of facility registrations to date than anticipated. As the law stands, all domestic and foreign food facilities that manufacture, process, pack or hold food for consumption in the United States must register with FDA by this Friday.

"We suspect that many food facilities may not have registered due to FDA's announcement about a four-month discretionary enforcement period beginning on December 12. However, we want to remind companies that 'discretionary enforcement' is not the same as 'no enforcement'," said Clay Detlefsen, IDFA vice president of regulatory affairs and counsel. "FDA is legally permitted to enforce the rule as of December 13.

"FDA has stated that it will use the four-month period to further educate the regulated community about the rule and allow for registrants to correct any mistakes, rather than to give more time to companies that have blatantly ignored the regulation. IDFA believes that all affected companies should make, at the very least, a good faith effort to register by December 12. Failure to do this could bring civil or criminal penalties."

In addition to FDA's free registration service, IDFA has partnered with a company to offer a fee-based value-added registration service to assist the dairy and food industries in meeting this regulatory requirement. IDFA's partner is an independent company, Registration and Licensing Systems, Inc. (RLS), which specializes in web-based regulatory data registration for government agencies. RLS is providing its services to the dairy industry exclusively through IDFA. For complete information on the benefits of RLS's online facility registration service, or to sign up, click here.

The FDA registration service can be found at https://www.access.fda.gov/oaa/

Posted December 8, 2003