Seafood safety is never far from Doris Hicks’ mind. As a seafood specialist with the Delaware Sea Grant College Program, demonstrating seafood handling techniques to members of the public or helping industry members implement new governmental regulations is all in a day’s work.
In her latest endeavor, she collaborated on an Internet training course aimed at ensuring seafood safety across the nation.
The newly launched course focuses on the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) regulation for the processing, packing, or holding of human food. The GMP regulation, which applies to all FDA-regulated food products, addresses the basic sanitary controls required for all processing plants, wholesale or distribution firms, and warehouses or storage facilities to ensure that the food they process, handle, or store is safe and wholesome.
“It will be very valuable in helping industry members better understand Good Manufacturing Processes so they can produce food in a safe environment,” said Hicks, who reviewed and wrote several of the training modules.
Hicks was part of a multi-institution team that collaborated on the project led by New York Sea Grant and Cornell Cooperative Extension. Other institutions working on the course included the University of Rhode Island, FDA, Virginia Tech, University of Florida, and North Carolina State University.
The new online training course consists of 12 modules covering each section of the GMP regulation along with an explanation of its intent, examples and strategies for compliance, and resources for additional information. The course is designed to accommodate a variety of different learning styles. Students can view the course materials “live” on the Internet, download files to their computers, or use the audio feature to hear the course content read to them by a professional narrator.
Registration costs $50, and a discount is available for groups who plan to train 20 or more people from the same company or organization at the same time. To register and learn more, visit http://gmptraining.aem.cornell.edu.
This project was partially funded by a grant awarded to Cornell University from the National Integrated Food Safety Initiative of the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
To learn more about Delaware Sea Grant, visit www.deseagrant.org. For more on UD’s College of Marine and Earth Studies, visit www.ocean.udel.edu.