Glades Crop Care, Inc. (GCC), will carry out the following plan of work for the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Research and Education Foundation (Foundation) in pursuit of their goal of preparing Florida's produce industry to meet high food safety standards.

Stage 1 work will be the preparation of a Toolkit, consisting of materials, both printed and audio/visual, as needed, for growers to use in:

1. Learning the concepts of safe food production, handling, storage and shipping,
2. Self-evaluation of their existing programs,
3. Identifying risks and hazards that need to be minimized,
4. Establishing or modifying practices to minimize those risks and
5. Evaluating those new or modified practices.
6. Third party audits

The prototype Toolkit will be prepared between September and November 2002. Improvement and modification of this prototype Toolkit will be ongoing through March 2003.

Deployment of the Implementation Toolkit

After the educational and evaluative materials have been prepared, Stage 2 work will be the actual deployment in the field. This process will involve presenting the Toolkit to individual farm, grove and packinghouse operators, and then working with them through the process of evaluating and improving their programs according to the guidelines set forth in the Toolkit. Interested entities will contact Glades Crop Care for meeting scheduling and visitation coordination. Those contacting FFVA will be channeled to Glades Crop Care for scheduling.

The initial meeting will include as part of the risk assessment a pre-implementation evaluation of the existing food safety program. Meeting with the diverse operations throughout our state will be necessary in order to assure that the materials in the Toolkit address the widest possible array of risks as well as the widest possible range of feasible practices to mitigate those risks. That is, while most of the risks, and their associated mitigation practices may be shared among all the commodities produced in Florida, some commodities or localities will present situations that will require modification of the standard recommended practices. Similarly, whether because of differences in resources, scale of operation or location, some operations may require modification of recommended practices to meet their particular needs. Therefore, at least during the initial deployment of the system, there will necessarily be a considerable amount of interaction between GCC and the growers. After this process has been worked through in different parts of the state and across the diverse group of commodities, it should be possible to provide options in the original Toolkit to allow virtually any operation to use it to prepare a food safety program.

Toolkit deployment will begin in November 2002 and continue through October 2003.

We plan on a two-phased deployment. Phase one is described above and will require an estimated 75% of the deployment efforts. Phase two of the deployment is a follow-up evaluation or a third party audit to monitor and assess the progress made by the entities. We plan a Phase One goal of working with 250 farming entities. Of those 250 entities, we expect participation of 150 designees or volunteers in a Follow-Up Progress Evaluation (FUPE) and up to 50 also select third party auditing.

Evaluation of the Program Deployment

As described above the effectiveness of the program will be determined by conducting 150 FUPE's including the third party audits by GCC's food safety auditing staff. These evaluations will focus on assessing the efficacy of specific risk mitigation practices through on-site inspections, microbiological testing and other means deemed necessary. Particular emphasis will be placed on evaluating the participant's ability to use and abide by the operating procedures, record-keeping formats and self-evaluation checklists that will be included in the Toolkit. This should provide an excellent assessment of the Toolkit's utility, adaptability and effectiveness in developing user level food safety programs in diverse settings. Evaluation of the Toolkit will be completed by October, 2003.

Additional performance evaluations may employ an auditing format similar to those used during an independent third party audit (ITPA). Independent confirmation of the efficacy of the Toolkit materials may be obtained when interested growers, packers or shippers submit to an ITPA, but this will not be considered necessary for program participation.

Education and Outreach

After the Implementation Toolkit has been deployed, field tested and evaluated, the results of that deployment will be presented to the public in a workshop to be conducted by the FFVA. This presentation will serve to introduce the system and to describe its use to the general farming community. This event will occur in March 2004.