Gen. Colin Powell, my idol, and a real American hero

PHOTO: "The Honorable General Colin Powell
served at Fort Devens, 1960's" 
by Fort Devens Museum is licensed
under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Well, it has just been a crummy week for the team. One member just found out a close relative has days to live, another is looking for an answer, but the preliminary is something no one wants. Meanwhile, other team members are hearing sad and stressful news about loved ones. As I said, it appears to not be a great time for the psyche of our team.

For me, I lost one person whom I believed to be immortal. Although that person was not perfect (no one is), he damn sure exemplified perfection when he could. I’m speaking, of course, about General Colin Powell, who passed away earlier this week.

There are so many stories about him, I shall not repeat them. Just take a look at his awards. Here are some things I remember: The image someone carried out of fire fight the year I was born. Disagreeing about strategy and prevailing as he moved up the ranks. Developing a combat doctrine that said: Don’t fight if you cannot win; sacrifice no one for the sake of sacrifice. Stopping and asking a sergeant (who was doing a bit of hero worship): “Where are you headed” and then providing directions.

Gen. Powell exemplified what I aspire to be. He was a human, a leader, a real American. He was what Americans are supposed to be: real people — not perfect, but real, in that they do what they believe.

You may disagree with that basic premise, and that is your right — a right he fought hard for you to keep, by the way. I didn’t cry in front of my team when I heard he had passed, because they don’t know who he really was and is to me. I needed the time to pull this together, which led me to realize just how important Gen. Powell was to me — and now my team will know as well. 

Gen. Powell was (and will be remembered as) an American hero. He is, was, and will always be “The General.”

Gen. Powell, you are, and will always be, a true American that held to the ideals of America, even when others tried to pull you down. Thank you for your service, but especially thank you for motivating this punk from Menomonie, Wis., to always strive for perfection. Yes, we can’t reach it, but we can always try. Lesson learned.

RIP, General!

— Andrew Anthony Lorenz, SFC (Ret)

Senator’s stop at Sailer’s sparks speculation about success

Recently, U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin (Wis.) visited Sailer’s Meats in Elmwood. Sen. Baldwin toured Sailer’s along with several other meat processors from the area — and yours truly!

During the tour, Jake Sailer pointed out equipment and explained the processes, as well as what it cost to modernize in his current location.

We then did a very short Q&A about the current location, which was designed and built out approximately 10 years ago in the heart of the small town. With the changing business environment, however, Sailer’s has outgrown the facility based on the product demand they’re seeing. At this point, we headed to “Sailer’s 3.0” — the new location near Interstate 94 — toured that location and had another Q&A with Sen. Baldwin. 

Understand, this wasn’t a “photo-op” visit; it was a chance for Sen. Baldwin to see first-hand what it takes to run a growing business in the meat industry and learn the real costs associated with modernizing a small to mid-size facility.

During the discussion, the topic of women in the workforce and in ownership/leadership roles came up. We also discussed automation and the unique position small and mid-sized meat- and poultry-processing facilities found themselves in when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. 

The challenge to grow a small meat and poultry shop into a mid-sized one really boils down to how much capital can be secured. Equipment costs are very high, and when you look at the cost of building the facility, let alone the necessary refrigeration, and the struggles to attract additional employees, acquire automation, etc., it rapidly becomes unattainable for the average small processor.

Sen. Baldwin has helped already by pushing for funding in the American Rescue Plan, which is geared to strengthening the food supply chain. She was keen to hear how the funds would be used by small plants to modernize and retain employees, and how the food supply chain is being strengthened by smaller, local facilities.

The meeting caused me to step back and really put a critical eye to our supply chain. Looking out the home-office window, I am surrounded by farmers who are the first link in that chain. I work with processors and distributors daily, and at the end of the day, I am a consumer. 

I believe we are seeing a fundamental change in how we supply food to the American public. Mega plants that maximized efficiency also have an Achilles’ heel; the pandemic shined a light on the fact that those very things that made them efficient also made them vulnerable. 

The facilities that weathered this storm the best were the small and mid-size facilities. Those that had invested in automation and employee protections early on had the least amount of disruption.

What’s the future hold? I see a need for all sizes and types of operations. Having said that, I do believe that most of the growth is going to be in the mid-size to small, multi-facility companies. Those businesses are small enough to serve the local community, but large enough to take advantage of new technology and leverage innovation. 

I applaud Sen. Baldwin for reaching out to industry, learning first-hand about the process, and investigating how she might help them grow to ultimately support the local communities, towns and cities that surround them.

This brings me to an innovator and entrepreneur we recently lost far too soon — Andy Shaw of Cypress Valley Meat Co. Andy not only believed in small, local, community meat and poultry establishments, but he proved that they could grow by providing burst capacity to larger communities, all while still supporting the local communities around them. He leaves us a great example of how small processors can win, and he will be missed!

— Andrew Lorenz, president, andrew@werfoodsafety.com

10 steps to protect your operation against cyberattacks

I just finished writing an article about cybersecurity targeted for a wider processing audience, and even though they didn’t put a strict word count on me, there simply wasn’t enough room for the article to get down into the weeds of prevention, particularly for the small processors.

If you read the article (coming soon to ProvisionerOnline.com, and will be linked here), you should come to realize that no one is immune from cyberattacks these days. The belief that “I’m too small to be noticed or hit hard,” is misguided at best and a crock at worst.

So, exactly how does a small operator protect itself from cyberattack?   

Here are my top 10 thoughts on what you can do:

1) Use real passwords.  A minimum of 12 digits, use numbers, special symbols, caps, etc.  Do NOT share them!  Change them often.

2) Use a network firewall on your incoming Internet connection, not just a router — and don’t rely on the Windows computer firewall as your only line of defense.

3) The QuickBooks computer needs to be on its own network and only limited people can have access to it!  Encrypt your data!

4) If you have WiFi for your customers, keep it on a separate, isolated network.

5) Limit the duties or capabilities assigned to in-house computers.  If you have a smokehouse computer, for example, then just use it for the smokehouse, not for surfing the Internet!

6) Update your computer operating systems!  Security updates are often deployed based on an active threat.

7) Segment your network. Your guest access WiFi, for example, should not be connected to your main network, and your finance/point of sales system should have its own network. Everything should be siloed so that the bad guys can’t take everything down in one or two shots.  Computers used to connect to email, surf the Web for research/social media, etc., should be isolated to a separate network and should be identified in your firewall as high-risk devices.

8) Have an outsourced IT expert review your setup; and when you look at the ROI on this move, imagine having to replace every computer in your shop, the lost time, the lost customers, etc., versus what becomes a minimal cost of having an expert set up and maintain your systems.

9) Look at your options and determine what your level of risk is.  If you are a super-small shop with two computers and a basic Internet connection, it might make the most sense to simply add a firewall box. You can get one with a very good next-generation firewall for less than $300.

10) If an employee leaves your company and they had access to your networks, you need to change the passwords ASAP!

At the end of the day, cybersecurity information can appear overwhelming — there is a lot of information on how to protect your business — but you must educate yourself and your team.  Make sure your team understands that your business systems are not meant to be used for surfing the Web and that passwords cannot be shared.  Finally, at the absolute very least, please run virus/malware protection. Windows ships with built-in security tools, please use them!

— Andrew Lorenz, president, We R Food Safety!, andrew@werfoodsafety.com

Salmonellosis outbreak from ’95 does NOT support humidity as a critical parameter in jerky processing

I just had a rather enlightening conversation with a senior USDA-FSIS official about the need for humidity during jerky manufacturing.

I asked, “How does humidity destroy pathogens?”

The official really didn’t know the answer, but he did state that, without humidity, pathogens can become heat-resistant, and Salmonella can grow and survive normal lethality.

When I asked for the studies that backed up these statements, the official pointed to the same studies they always do. I then explained how those studies didn’t actually take product to lethality (i.e., what was surviving was only surviving longer than the non-treated Salmonella). The official countered by citing the salmonellosis outbreak from 1995 in New Mexico — as is typical of this conversation.

Here, too, the problem with citing that case is lethality, as the product implicated in that outbreak should be considered a raw beef jerky, not fully cooked.

Per the published outbreak report by the CDC (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00039423.htm), partially frozen product was placed on racks and was pushed into a drying room. The chamber temperature (not the product’s internal temperature) was set at 140 F for three hours, then reduced to 115 F for approximately 19 hours. Therefore, the product was never exposed to a lethality treatment, and hence, by definition, it was a raw product. The report also states that no product temperatures were ever recorded.  

I promised to send the official the CDC report to remind them (or make them aware) that the production technique that was used resulted in a raw product that clearly wasn’t ready to eat (and that doesn’t even factor in other inputs or lack of them, such as sanitation, equipment, plant elevation, etc.).

It’s a shame this conversation even needed to happen, and that we have to point this out about a case more than 25 years in the past. However, it’s not the only time we’ve had these conversations lately — we have been seeing more and more actions by USDA-FSIS around humidity requirements based on these incorrect assumptions and faulty arguments. When we bring up actual science around heat resistance and pathogen growth, little discussion occurs, and FSIS inevitably falls back on the New Mexico outbreak as their “final answer” for why humidity is needed in jerky processing.

Is humidity during processing a control factor? Yes, as it assists in heat transfer. When you are measuring the internal temperature of a product, you are, in fact, measuring the transfer of energy into the product. One way to increase the rate of transfer is to increase the humidity in your cooking vessel.  At home, when you boil something, it cooks faster than it would if you cooked it in a pan, given the same energy input. But that doesn’t make humidity a critical parameter, it makes it a supporting parameter. The critical parameter is the rapid transfer of energy into the product to denature the proteins of the pathogens, rendering them non-viable (killing them). You measure this energy transfer by using internal product temperature monitoring devices.  

The entire paradigm of “chamber” temperature and “chamber” humidity now falls on a very niche part of the industry (who implement and know their process — and make some great products!). It doesn’t apply to the vast majority of the industry making jerky or other shelf-stable products.

HACCP is about analyzing for hazards, not creating a plan and then making products. Know your process and apply your controls, and you’ll be in great shape.

However, unless you want to spend a lot of time arguing with regulators, point to the sentence in the 1999 version of Appendix A, which allows you to rely on a sealed oven during cooking as the evidence of how you deal with heat transfer. I promise you that it will be a lot less frustrating!

— Andrew Lorenz, president, We R Food Safety!, andrew@werfoodsafety.com

File loading ... loading ... the cost of buying cheap computers, unfit for their roles

Think about your typical workday. Do you work with spreadsheets a lot? How about doing research on Web sites? Do you work with databases? How about PDF files? How do your employees use their computers?

“Back in the day” (truthfully, not that far back … think just 25 to 30 years), computer access may have been something that many people in a company didn’t have — depending on the industry, of course. Today, nearly everyone works on a computer for part of their job — heck, we carry computers with us everywhere we go! Computers have become a necessary tool for business.

One thing that always strikes me as funny, however: Although most of us consider computers to be important tools, many still purchase them as though they were a commodity asset or an afterthought. Small operators typically run down to Walmart or over to Best Buy and pick up the cheapest one they can find. Larger companies try to strike a deal on volume. In both cases, though, rarely has anyone considered the tasks the computer will perform and purchased appropriate systems. Is it a lack of knowledge or time?

We R Food Safety! is a typical small company, one in which our people wear a lot of different hats. Yet, we all have bedrock responsibilities around which we try to offer the proper tools. To be efficient and successful, each employee — whether a programmer, consultant, sales representative, office staff, etc. — needs the right computer with appropriate power and software.

Let’s take the programming team for example. When we first started the company, we fell into the trap many new companies fall into and purchased the cheapest computers we could, in order to save money. Our programmers compiled code about three times a day, each time taking 20 minutes, and rendering the low-power processing system unusable during that time. For approximately 60 total minutes each day, they couldn’t do anything else on the computer because it was compiling code.

One day, I had brought in my home computer because my laptop had broken, and we ended up compiling code on that more powerful system. It took less than two minutes to compile, and the computer was strong enough to handle me doing other work at the same time. By purchasing and using the cheaper computing alternative, we lost led to a monthly loss of approximately $800.00 (assuming four weeks in a month at a $40/hour rate). Suffice to say, we went out and bought better systems for approximately $1,200, which paid for themselves in approximately six weeks. Those units lasted approximately three years before being replaced by even better systems — over the three-year lifespan of primary use, each unit saved approximately $30,000 in lost productivity. But this is an extreme example.

Here’s another example of how idle time adds up. Our office team processes a lot of spreadsheets. Some of these spreadsheets are quite large: Opening, saving, and closing them takes a fair amount of computer processor resources. I was curious, so I did a very unscientific study comparing an Intel Core i3 unit to an Intel Core i7 unit — neither one considered by me to be top-of-the-line computers. The i3 cost approximately $399, and the i7 approximately $899.

The i7 can open my business projections spreadsheet in less than two seconds; the i3 took eight seconds. That six-second difference piled up over a day’s worth of opening similar spreadsheets balloons to approximately four minutes a day of lost time for spreadsheets alone. Again, while not scientific by any means, I then tried to extrapolate how much additional time I would lose over the course of a day using the i3 vs. the i7 on other files, and I figured I’d lose approximately 10 minutes per day. I then attempted to estimate the time lost opening Microsoft Outlook, rendering Web pages, etc., and came up with a rough total of 20 minutes per day waiting on the slower CPU. That further equates to roughly 6.5 hours per month of lost productivity, or about seven months to recoup my investment in the i7. Over a roughly three-year lifespan, the i7 would save $3,770 in lost productivity.

So, which benchmarks should you use to determine the right computer for the right job? We have found that the i3 is a great single-task unit, used strictly as a testing unit for a probe solution we have developed. i5 units are decent for run-of-the-mill tasks like basic reception work or research online. For any heavier workload beyond those tasks, we use the basic i7. Note, we are performing tasks on some AMD units, but the office jury is still out on them. Although thin clients and remote desktops are great for controlling security, they are costing you in productivity.

The key to any of this is pinpointing the tasks you want the new computer to perform, and then investing in the best one for the job. You don’t ask your sales team to make calls in a bus or tractor trailer, and by the same token, you don’t ship product in a Corvette.

More apropos, you wouldn’t negatively impact your processing operation by short-changing your investment or using technology ill-equipped to handle the task at hand.

Don’t do it with your back-of-the-house computing systems either.

— Andrew Lorenz, president, We R Food Safety!

 

 

 

Vilsack nomination bad news for meat industry

It is strange to be writing about politics on a food safety blog, but that is the world we are in right now.

With the announcement in December that Tom Vilsack would be President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Agriculture, many of us with first-hand knowledge of how he works were dismayed. Vilsack, as you likely know, served in the same role for eight years during Barack Obama’s two terms as President.

"USDA building" by brittreints is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Vilsack represents the “safe” choice in terms of party politics: Selecting either of the other two candidates for the position would have caused fighting within the Democratic party. So, President-elect Biden decided to avoid that conflict and nominated Vilsack, despite wide-ranging opposition to his selection from a variety of groups and individuals.

The grapevine talk says Vilsack was very good at raising money for the administration and will return to doing that again. Real-world history displays incidents few can forget: how he fired Shirley Sherrod; and a disdain for minorities, and small farmers and agriculture-related businesses that he was never able to hide. That disdain spilled over into FSIS rulemaking as well, with little to no consideration taken for the impacts on small and medium businesses.

The colossal disappearance of small plants during his last tenure set the industry up with a very weak fortress to use in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic over the last year. This time around, small processors should anticipate more of the same: a push for excessive regulation and oversight, which in turn will result in further erosion of their population.

Large processors will have a different experience with Vilsack in charge — if not an equally uncomfortable one. Processors “with money” should expect to see the FSIS undersecretary — with FSIS personnel in tow — knocking on their doors to solicit donations to the party at his behest. We can also expect him to negotiate settlements with the unions, who in turn make large donations to the party, and so forth. 

The key for everyone at this point is safety in numbers. I am recommending to all our clients that they become members of an applicable, national trade organization. It is going to be critical for everyone that our voices be heard. We R Food Safety! has been active in working with the American Association of Meat Processors (AAMP) and will continue to support AAMP; additionally, I have directed our team to reach out and become more involved with other trade organization partners as well. The goal is to strengthen and enhance proactive dialog with those in Washington. 

We R Food Safety! is not a lobbying group, and I don’t intend for us ever to become one. Nevertheless, we are going to take a much more active approach in supporting those that are working directly in Washington as a result of this Cabinet nomination.

During Vilsack’s first stint as Secretary of Agriculture, we did see evidence that he dislikes negative press intensely, as he offered to rehire Sherrod after the public outcry. With that in mind, while we hope we don’t have only negativity to discuss through Vilsack’s tenure, my team of experts and I will continue to write and advise on food safety through a variety of publications and outlets, with the goal of making sure that what comes out of Washington supports the industry and the American consumer.

— Andrew Lorenz, president, andrew@werfoodsafety.com