BILL ANALYSIS Ó ----------------------------------------------------------------- |SENATE RULES COMMITTEE | AB 2130| |Office of Senate Floor Analyses | | |1020 N Street, Suite 524 | | |(916) 651-1520 Fax: (916) | | |327-4478 | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- THIRD READING Bill No: AB 2130 Author: Pan (D) and Gatto (D), et al. Amended: 5/1/14 in Assembly Vote: 27 - Urgency SENATE HEALTH COMMITTEE : 9-0, 6/11/14 AYES: Hernandez, Morrell, Beall, De León, DeSaulnier, Evans, Monning, Nielsen, Wolk SENATE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE : Senate Rule 28.8 ASSEMBLY FLOOR : 73-0, 5/8/14 - See last page for vote SUBJECT : Retail food safety SOURCE : Author DIGEST : This bill repeals provisions of law enacted in 2013 that prohibits retail food employees from contacting exposed ready-to-eat foods with their bare hands, and replaces these provisions with the law that existed prior to the enactment of these provisions, which requires food employees to minimize bare hand contact with ready-to-eat foods. ANALYSIS : Existing law: 1.Establishes the California Retail Food Code (CRFC) to regulate retail food safety, which is enforced by local environmental CONTINUED AB 2130 Page 2 health officers. 2.Prohibits food employees from contacting exposed, ready-to-eat food with their bare hands, and requires these employees to use suitable utensils, including deli tissue, spatulas, tongs, single-use gloves, or dispensing equipment. 3.Defines "ready-to-eat food" as food that is in a form that is edible without additional preparation to achieve food safety. 4.Permits food employees not serving a highly susceptible population to contact exposed, ready-to-eat food with their bare hands if specified requirements are met. 5.Requires food handlers to obtain a food handler card every three years from an accredited provider, as specified. Requires food handler cards to be issued only upon successful completion of a training course that meets specified requirements. This bill: 1.Repeals provisions of law that prohibit food employees in retail food facilities from contacting exposed, ready-to-eat food with their bare hands, and requires these employees to use suitable utensils, including deli tissue, spatulas, tongs, single-use gloves, or dispensing equipment, including provisions that permitted food employees to contact ready-to-eat food under specified circumstances. 2.Requires food employees to minimize bare hand and arm contact with non-prepackaged food that is in a ready-to-eat form. 3.Requires food employees to use utensils, including scoops, forks, tongs, paper wrappers, gloves, or other implements, to assemble ready-to-eat food or to place ready-to-eat food on tableware or in other containers, but permits food employees to assemble or place on tableware or in other containers ready-to-eat food in an approved food preparation area without using utensils if hands are cleaned in accordance with specified required procedures. 4.Requires food that has been served to the consumer and then wrapped or prepackaged at the direction of the consumer to be CONTINUED AB 2130 Page 3 handled only with utensils, which are required to be properly sanitized before reuse. 5.Contains an urgency clause requiring it to go into immediate effect in order to protect public health and safety by developing better food safety procedures for ready-to-eat food and by avoiding confusion among local health agencies and small businesses at the earliest time possible. Background Foodborne illness. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), each year roughly one in six Americans gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 people die of foodborne diseases. The spread of germs from the hands of food workers to food is an important cause of foodborne illness outbreaks in restaurants. One of the most important steps to preventing transmission of these pathogens is ensuring that food employees do no work when they are ill. Proper hand washing reduces the spread of fecal-oral pathogens from the hands of a food employee to foods, and effective hand washing includes scrubbing, rinsing, and complete drying of hands. However, the CDC notes that hand washing alone might not always successfully remove pathogens from heavily contaminated hands, and infected food employees may not always be identified and removed from food preparation activities, which leads to the recommendations to minimize or prohibit bare hand contact of ready-to-eat foods. Minimizing vs. prohibiting bare hand contact . Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Model Food Code includes a prohibition on food workers touching ready-to-eat foods with bare hands, the U.S. FDA later requested that the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF), within the United States Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service, examine the scientific data on the risk associated with this practice. Among the specific questions the US FDA posed to NACMCF was: if it is possible to interrupt transmission of foodborne illnesses via bare hand contact, which of the following interventions will provide maximum public health benefit: (1) prohibition against ill or infected workers from preparing food; (2) hand washing/personal sanitation regimens; or (3) a blanket prohibition against bare hand contact with ready-to-eat foods? The NACMCF issued recommendations in 1999, concluding that "minimizing bare hand CONTINUED AB 2130 Page 4 contact with ready-to-eat food provides an additional means or interrupting disease transmission, when used in combination with the exclusion/restriction of ill food workers and proper hand washing. However, most members of the Committee deemed the available scientific data insufficient to support a blanket prohibition of bare hand contact with ready-to-eat foods." Gloves may reduce hand washing frequency . In a study published in 2007, in the Journal of Food Protection, entitled "Factors Related to Food Worker Hand Hygiene Practices" researchers collected observational data on 321 food workers and their hand washing practices. Results indicated that workers only made an attempt at washing their hands (ran their hands under water) 32% of the time when hand washing would be recommended, and only appropriately washed their hands (using soap and drying their hands) 27% of the time washing was recommended. Interestingly, however, the attempted and appropriate hand washing rates were significantly lower when gloves were worn (18% and 16 %, respectively) than when gloves were not worn (37% and 30%). The authors of this study stated that these findings "suggest that the hand washing practices of food workers need to be improved, glove use may reduce hand washing, and restaurants should consider reorganizing their food preparation activities to reduce the frequency with which hand washing is needed." Comments According to the author, the Legislature passed a bill, AB 1252 (Committee on Health, Chapter 556, Statutes of 2013) that made many, mostly minor, changes to the CRFC. Like all Assembly Health Committee-authored bills, AB 1252 was intended to be a consensus bill. It had no opposition, and it was agreed that if opposition to any of the bill's provisions arose at any point in the process, those provisions would be immediately removed from the bill. Since the enactment of AB 1252 on January 1, 2014, many small restaurants and bars have raised serious concerns about a provision in the new law that prohibits bare hand contact with ready-to-eat food. Given these businesses' concerns about the cost and public health value of this prohibition, it is clear that the Committee bill process was not appropriate for this provision, which should have been fully vetted and debated before being enacted. Environmental health directors statewide have agreed to a "soft roll-out," where they are not penalizing facilities for failure to comply with the CONTINUED AB 2130 Page 5 bare hand contact prohibition until July 1, 2014. Therefore, it is important for this bill, which contains an urgency clause, to be enacted before that date. Prior Legislation AB 1252 (Committee on Health) made numerous technical, clarifying, and non-controversial changes to the CRFC, and prohibits bare hand contact with ready-to-eat food without prior authorization from the local environmental health department. SB 602 (Padilla, Chapter 309, Statutes of 2010) requires a food handler to obtain a food handler card within 30 days after employment at a food facility by successfully completing a training course, and every three years thereafter. SB 241 (George Runner, Chapter 571, Statutes of 2009) enacted a number of clean-up changes to the CRFC and provided for the regulation of temporary and mobile food facilities under the CRFC. SB 744 (George Runner, Chapter 96, Statutes of 2007) enacted numerous technical, clarifying, and non-substantive changes to the CRFC. SB 144 (George Runner, Chapter 23, Statutes of 2006) repealed and reenacted the California Uniform Retail Food Facilities Law as the CRFC. FISCAL EFFECT : Appropriation: No Fiscal Com.: Yes Local: Yes SUPPORT : (Verified 6/20/14) Ambrosia Catering and Cafes, Sacramento American Bao Bar, San Francisco Bartavelle Coffee & Wine Bar, Berkeley Berkeley Organization for Animal Advocacy Bits, Bites, and Boxes, Loomis Caffe 817, Oakland Californians Against Waste Citizen Hotel, Sacramento Coffee, Tea, and Tulips, Mission Viejo Culinary Edge, San Francisco CONTINUED AB 2130 Page 6 de Vere's Irish Pub, Sacramento Der Biergarten, Sacramento Dish It Up Catering and Diggers Deli, Vacaville Dos Coyotes Border Café Eden Vale Inn, Placerville Ella Dining Room and Bar, Sacramento Fox & Goose Public House, Sacramento Freeport Bakery, Sacramento Georges at the Cove, La Jolla Golden Gate Restaurant Association Grange Restaurant and Bar, Sacramento Harlow's Restaurant and Night Club, Sacramento Haven Gastropub, Orange & Pasadena Jules Thin Crust, Oakland & Danville Marrow, Oakland Mikuni Restaurant Group Mulvaney's B&L, Sacramento Noe Valley Bakery and Bread Company, San Francisco Paragary's Restaurant Group, Sacramento Potato Shack Café, Encinitas Provisions Market, Orange Relish Culinary Adventures, Vacaville Rice Paper Scissors, San Francisco Rick's Tavern on Main, Santa Monica River City Brewing Company, Sacramento River City Saloon, Sacramento Saucy Restaurant, Ukiah Selland Family Restaurants, Sacramento Selland's Market Cafe, Sacramento Sous Beurre Kitchen, San Francisco Taco Asylum, Costa Mesa Venissimo Cheese, San Diego ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT : A number of restaurants have written in support of this bill, including Biba Restaurant, Der Biergarten, de Vere's Irish Pub, Dos Coyotes Border Café, Ella Dining Room and Bar, Fox & Goose Public House, Freeport Bakery, and others. These restaurants state that the prohibition on bare hand contact will require bars and restaurants to buy and discard thousands of disposable gloves, imposing a significant financial burden and environmental impact. Mikuni Restaurant Group states that many professionals in their industry agree that cooks wearing gloves tend not to change their gloves between tasks. In addition, Mikuni states that for the sushi industry, gloves pose CONTINUED AB 2130 Page 7 a significant physical risk due to the intricate knife work involved in sushi. Mikuni states that gloves do have their place in the kitchen, and they do wear them for many tasks, but a blanket law requiring everyone to wear gloves for all ready-to-eat foods does not provide their customers with a safer product. Californians Against Waste also supports this bill, stating that because wearing gloves tends to give people a false sense of cleanliness, restaurant employees may not wash hands prior to gloves, increasing the risk of contamination. Californians Against Waste also notes that when employees have to wear single-use gloves at all times, it puts a strain on resources and generates an unnecessary amount of waste in single-use plastic gloves. ASSEMBLY FLOOR : 73-0, 5/8/14 AYES: Achadjian, Alejo, Allen, Ammiano, Atkins, Bigelow, Bloom, Bocanegra, Bonilla, Bonta, Bradford, Brown, Buchanan, Ian Calderon, Campos, Chau, Chávez, Chesbro, Conway, Cooley, Dababneh, Dahle, Daly, Dickinson, Donnelly, Fong, Fox, Frazier, Beth Gaines, Garcia, Gatto, Gomez, Gonzalez, Gordon, Grove, Hagman, Harkey, Roger Hernández, Holden, Jones, Jones-Sawyer, Levine, Linder, Logue, Lowenthal, Maienschein, Medina, Melendez, Mullin, Muratsuchi, Nazarian, Nestande, Olsen, Pan, Patterson, Perea, Quirk, Quirk-Silva, Rendon, Ridley-Thomas, Rodriguez, Salas, Skinner, Stone, Ting, Wagner, Waldron, Weber, Wieckowski, Wilk, Williams, Yamada, John A. Pérez NO VOTE RECORDED: Eggman, Gorell, Gray, Hall, Mansoor, V. Manuel Pérez, Vacancy JL:e 6/23/14 Senate Floor Analyses SUPPORT/OPPOSITION: SEE ABOVE **** END **** CONTINUED