Food safety law: Six ways it will make food safer

3. Access to records

Tony Avelar/The Christian Science Monitor/File
Tom Nunes III, vice president of operations at Nunes Company, examines a food safety log that is kept for every field that the company harvests in Salinas, Calif., in this 2010 file photo. The new food-safety law gives the FDA clear authority to view company records when it suspects there's a problem with its food.

Until now, FDA inspectors didn't have clear authority to demand access to a food company's records. The new law "allows them to have more of an early warning when in the plant," Ms. Smith DeWaal says. Records can alert them to "things that they might not be able to see when they're in the plant."

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