Food Safety For Tree Nuts: Proposed Updated R707

The department of agriculture circulated an updated “Standards Regarding Food Hygiene and Food Safety of Regulated Agricultural Products of Plant Origin Intended for Export” (previously R707) to industries for comment. Public participation period closed at the end of August.

A notable development in the new draft is the inclusion of tree nuts as a regulated agricultural product, along with a more formal integration of good agricultural practices and traceability requirements.

SAPPA and SAMAC collaborated on this project. We appointed Anelich consulting to help formulate consolidating comments on the proposed regulations. These comments was submitted at the end of August.

Our combined comments on the proposed regulations were to indicate that tree nuts in-shell can be seen as low risk from a food safety perspective, therefore the objective was to make provision for this in the regulation and therefore minimizing the effect on the producers.

For now, it is important to note that food safety is a focus point for the department of agriculture. We are yet to see what effect this will have on the pecan nut industry once the new document is gazetted.

We will cover more on this topic on the Information Day on 7 November.

We will keep the industry update regarding formalizing and publication of these regulations.