OLYMPIA, Wash. — Washington has tens of thousands of farms producing billions of dollars worth of meat, produce, and dairy products.
Much of what’s grown in Washington is exported, but there are plenty of locally produced items sold in-state, at grocery stores, farmer’s markets, and restaurants. Everybody expects the items offered for sale to be safe. So who makes sure that the operations are following the proper precautions?
The US Department of Agriculture and the Washington State Department of Agriculture play leading roles in that effort in conjunction with the Washington State Department of Health.
During Q&A on TVW news program The Impact, Assistant Director Luisa Castro of the WSDA Food Safety and Consumer Services Division shed light on the scale of food production monitoring and contaminant tracing that happens behind the scenes.
The WSDA Food Safety Program covers shell eggs, food processing plants, custom meat operations, storage warehouses, cottage food operations, cannabis-infused edible processors, hemp extract processors, milk processing plants, and milk producers.
“So there is just inspection across the whole chain that is happening every day in Washington state. We have inspectors throughout the state,” said Castro.
Milk production is a major focus.
“That is, you know, a very, high risk food,” said Castro. “So we are always in dairy operations, even during Covid. Even during HPAI events our inspectors have to prioritize dairy because milk— everybody, you know kids, school lunches, people are consuming milk. It’s a very important commodity in the state and we have to keep it safe. So we have a laboratory that takes in these samples on a weekly basis and tests for a lot of these pathogens,” said Castro.
According to Castro, the registration requirements for food producers are meant to insure that businesses follow safety guidelines and to establish a framework for tracing problems back to their source in the event of an outbreak of something like Salmonella, E. coli, or Listeria.
“People don’t understand there are constant recalls out there,” said Castro. “We have the food safety program. We also have what’s called the RRT. It’s a rapid response team. It’s a partnership between Washington State, Department of Agriculture, Department of Health, our local health jurisdictions, and the FDA. When there is a case locally within Washington state, we immediately find out from our epidemiologist that there is someone out there sick. And so we have to try to trace it back to what foods that it comes from. So that team also is in constant contact with the FDA. Is a food that has been found to be contaminated produced in another state? Are we selling it in our state? Then we have to go in and tell all the grocery stores, you know, you need to pull that off the shelves so that, you know, there’s no contamination in our state,” said Castro.
Recall announcements are intended to warn a lot of people at once about potentially tainted products. In the digital age, store loyalty programs provide a platform for reaching individual shoppers who purchased a contaminated product before it was pulled from store shelves.
“A lot of individuals nowadays have shopper memberships, you know, to different grocery stores. And with that membership they’ve provided, you know, their home addresses, emails, phone numbers and so if there’s a need for a recall, we are able to at Washington State Department of Agriculture, contact those stores and ask for the shopper information. And so we’ll get lists and we work with our local health jurisdictions to contact those shoppers, to let them know that a recall is happening and to remove those things from their refrigerators, from their shelves, and dispose of them,” said Castro.
A 2024 audit found that the Washington State Department of Agriculture missed about 98% of the quarterly egg packing plant inspections required by law between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2023.
- “During the audit period, state law required the Department to perform 548 inspections, but it only performed 11 (2 percent).”
“An applicant who first gets started to be an egg handler, you know, to have chickens, they get a license through the Department of Revenue. That information, we have a link to that, and it was broken during the time of that inspection or that audit period. We had no idea. So that got fixed,” said Castro. “That state audit that we underwent was a very important one for us. It highlighted during that 2021 through 2023 time period that we were audited, what was going on? Where did we miss the mark on it? And so we’ve been trying to make internal changes, you know, beefing up our tracking system.”
The web of food producers has expanded significantly in the last five years with an explosion of home based and small scale food creators.
“In fact, we saw such an uptick during the Covid pandemic where a lot of people lost their businesses. And so they needed to, you know, support their families and support themselves. So we saw a huge surge of cottage food applications. And so we have a set of inspectors that go in and do that kind of work where they inspect the homes where these foods are being made,” said Castro. “People have a misconception about state regulators that we’re just—you know— mean, evil people trying to take down their businesses. And that is not the mission of anybody who works for the Washington State Department of Agriculture.”
“I had a great story from one of the inspectors that there was a high schooler making cakes and making pies,” said Castro. “So they worked with the student and got them up to speed to actually have their own processing of pies and step them up into that level of being a business person.”