Seafood Safety with Diana Zepp

Hi everyone, I'm Judy McMeekin, I lead the FDA's Office of Regulatory Affairs, also known as ORA. I am thrilled to present the first episode of our ORASpeaks Voices from the Field podcast series.

ORA plays a vital role in protecting consumers and patients and enhancing public health by ensuring timely access to safe, quality FDA regulated products.
We are the boots on the ground, every day, our employees across the U.S. conduct inspections and other activities to monitor the safety of FDA regulated products.

The ORASpeaks podcast series is a great way to hear their stories and learn more about how ORA keeps you and your family safe.

Did you know that a Parmesan cheese smell coming from a mahi-mahi is a sign it may not be safe to eat?

During this episode of ORASpeaks, you'll hear from ORA National Seafood Sensory Expert Diana Zepp. Diana is based in Atlanta. She uses her unique talents to ensure the seafood that reaches consumers, meets our quality standards.

And now enjoy the episode.

Host Ulysses Garrett: Hello, and welcome to the ORASpeaks podcast. I'm Ulysses Garrett, Multimedia Manager for the Office of Regulatory Affairs and the Office of Communications and Project Management. And today, I'm super excited to have our guest. She has a unique and important role here within ORA. The phrase something fishy really means a lot to her. Today. We're talking to Diana Zepp, National Seafood Sensory Expert based out of the Atlanta district. 

Diana, how are you today?

Diana Zepp, National Seafood Sensory Expert: I'm great you Ulysses. How are you?

Mr. Garrett: I'm feeling great and looking forward to having this conversation with you.

Ms. Zepp: Thank you. Alright.

Mr. Garrett: Well, thank you.

Ms. Zepp: Alright.

Mr. Garrett: So, first and foremost, Diana, what is a National Seafood Sensory Expert?

Ms. Zepp: To explain that, I want to start off with some basic information about sensory analysis and what we do specifically. A lot of people think they hear sensory analysts. You did what? I think a lot probably most people are a little confused about that. They have no idea that such a thing exists and people actually do it. But sensory analysts are really not that uncommon.

A lot of industry employs sensory analysts. The food and beverage industries, breweries, wineries and distilleries, and the perfume industry, to name just a few. And when you sit down. You open a bag of chips, have a hot dog or a piece of chocolate sip on your favorite beverage. You can be sure that sensory analysts were involved in developing those products.

Basically, there are two types of sensory analysis. The first one is subjective and it has to do with preferences, likes and dislikes and taste panels are a good example of that and usually takes panels they consist of untrained analysts. Volunteers and industry utilizes them quite a bit of the the people do they like it, do they not like it? Would consumers buy a lot of good information for them? Now the other type of sensory analysis is what we deal with here in FDA, it's objective analysis. The FDA sensory analyst are trained to put aside biases, preferences, likes and dislikes, and just report what we find out.

Statements like the shrimp smells briny or this fish smell sour is a straight statement of the facts, and now we have a lot of we have our own pretty unique vocabulary, a lot of descriptors that we commonly use for high quality products.

We may use terms like briny, meaty or sweet.High quality shrimp tend to smell briny. We use meaty a lot to refer to fresh tuna because it has a lot of hemoglobin in it and it will high quality. Tuna will smell like fresh raw meat and sweet of lot of products tend to have a sweet odor and mahi-mahi is one that often does. And moving on down the line we find neutral odors still pretty good quality, but the really high quality sensory attributes have dissipated.

And then to the lower end of passable, lower quality will get odors like stale oxidized and one of my personal favorites that we actually use is wet dog and...

Mr. Garrett: Wait a minute! Please tell me more.

Ms. Zepp: Wet dog is an odor that we find in low quality shrimp that's still passable. It's not decomposed, but it's very low quality and we smell it. It smells just like a wet dog and I think just about everybody has smelled a wet dog. So you know what I'm talking about. That's a term we actually use. It's a valid term, but and it would get on into the decomposed odors. Sour is usually the first one that appears. And then we'll move on from that to strong, sour, cheesy, decomposed mahi-mahi tends to smell like parmesan cheese. Putrid, that one's pretty nasty, firmented and ammonia. Depending on the product that we can find all kinds of different odors like that.

And then at the far end of the spectrum, advanced decomposition, we get into odors like fecal and garbage and fecal needs no explanation. Everybody knows what that means. And garbage is pretty much a conglomeration of all kinds of odors. I tend to describe it as you got your trash can in the summer, you open it up and that liquid that pools in the bottom and woo! That's what that is.

Fortunately, we don't really see that much of those types of things.

National Seafood Sensory Experts, specifically, in addition to performing sensory analysis, one of the things that we do is conduct training for FDA and other government agencies and private industry and that training involves instructing the workshops, planning the workshop, what products are we going to present, where we going to get them and we develop the products and when we pull them - it's what we call time temperature abuse. We start with high quality product and over time we let them the temperature come up and give them some time and we will pull them and cut them and and package them.

So we start usually we do 7 increments. The first one will be the highest quality, the last will be the lowest advanced decomposition. And normally for developing these training samples we travel overseas and work with firms overseas. I have been to Indonesia, Ecuador and Vietnam and some of my colleagues have been to Thailand and Guam. And it sounds glamorous and exciting. It is because we love to do it, but we spend the vast majority of our time in fish processing plants and it's it's hard work. It could be messy and noisy. Tuna canneries are quite noisy and sometimes we'll walk out really smelly.

Mr. Garrett: Yeah. So let me ask you this, so what drove you to to get into this particular field?

Ms. Zepp: Well, I was hired in the Atlanta lab as an entomologist. That's my background. I have a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Georgia, and I was hired into the filth and decomposition group as an entomologist. Of course, I did field identifying insects and such. And very soon after I started, started training and sensory analysis.

With trained, with a trained and very experienced sensory analysts in the group and I found out, I really, really enjoyed it and how long have you been with the FDA, 29 years and October I came on board in October 91.

Mr. Garrett: That's awesome.

Ms. Zepp: Yeah, it's yeah, quite a while. Sometimes it's hard to believe.

Mr. Garrett: So tell me. What is the most rewarding part of your job?

Ms. Zepp: Ohh goodness. Well, protecting the public health, of course, the main goal of FDA. But as a National Sensory Expert, I have to say the training all aspects of it. 
Instructing, planning the courses, developing the product and traveling overseas to develop the product and working with firms overseas, meeting the people and working with them and seeing the industry side of it and how things work there it's it's very interesting. I love it.

Mr. Garrett: So, I would be remiss if I did not ask you, do you take your job skills with you when you go shopping?

Ms. Zepp: Yes, I suppose I do.

Mr. Garrett: Have you ever walked into the into the grocery store and you be like, whoa, wait a minute.

Ms. Zepp: Ohh, unfortunately I have not for a while.

But yeah, you shouldn't be able to smell the seafood department at the front of the store. And I think we can all agree on that.

And honestly, my favorite places to buy seafood are the little markets right on the coast where it comes off the boat and right into the market. But that's, that's where I love to buy it. Very good quality and that is awesome.

Mr. Garrett: Diana, I really want to thank you for taking time out to spend some time with me as we continue to reach out and find out more interesting things about our folks in the field.

One thing I did learn is that I did pick up on some new terminology that you all use when it comes to categorizing the smell of fish. So I thank you for that.

Ms. Zepp: We did have our own unique language, I suppose.

Mr. Garrett: Well, Diana, I want to thank you again for taking time out of your day to sit and talk with me as we continue to shine the light bright on our folks out in the field with the Voices from the Field part of the ORA Speaks podcast series. 

Have yourself a wonderful day and I look forward to talking to you again very soon.

Ms. Zepp: Alright, thank you so much for having me. I'm always happy to talk about the sensory program and sensory analysis.