Background During the past year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) responded to food safety problems with contaminated spinach, lettuce, vegetable proteins, and peanut butter, among other foods. Whether contamination is unintentional or deliberate, there is a need to response faster and communicate more effectively with consumers and partners. Consumers protect themselves and their families from foodborne illness by responding promptly to FDA alerts. Important messages must be communicated clearly and though multiple forms of media to be effective, because different segments of the population use different technologies. In addition, major segments of the population do not use English as their primary language. In November, 2007, FDA released the Food Protection Plan, a comprehensive and integrated strategy to address both food safety and defense. The Plan calls for a rapid response as soon as contaminated food or feed is detected or when there is harm to people or animals. Identifying food safety threats sooner and determining the scope of the problem faster would enable FDA to quickly react and communicate the threat to industry and consumers. A major component of improving FDA’s response efforts is to improve communications with the public, industry and other stakeholders through aggressive, targeted food safety campaigns that disseminate clear and effective messages through multiple venues to all targeted audiences. In order to improve communication efforts, FDA must explore new avenues for communicating with the public, industry, and other stakeholders. Tapping into consumer generated media, such as blogs and online discussion forums, marketing information, and point-of-sale data would provide FDA with both new avenues for delivering messages as well the ability to target messages to the appropriate audience. In addition, using new mechanisms to reach the public and stakeholders would provide FDA with new means of measuring the effectiveness of communications. In order to evaluate the public health benefit of utilizing new communication tools, FDA seeks to develop a pilot to test and evaluate the effectiveness of new communication tools, such as using consumer generated media and marketing information, for quickly identifying and distributing information about food safety threats. Objective for Request for Sources FDA is looking to identify contractors who have the expertise to develop mechanisms to improve FDA’s recall communication in the following areas: a. Identify problems sooner by monitoring blogs and other media sources and looking at sales rates of products associated with foodborne illness. b. Communicate better and more directly with consumers and retailers by identifying stores selling recalled product and identify and target messages to populations with the highest consumption rates of the recalled products. c. Verify that communications are received and the correct actions are taken by monitoring the movement of the recalled product. d. Monitor the impact of recall communications, post-recall communications, and long-term impacts by monitoring consumer discussions on blogs and media coverage of the issue. Conduct quick surveys of consumers to determine their understanding and interpretation of FDA communications and gauge consumer opinions. Description of Information Requested The purpose of this sources sought is to solicit information from organizations that have the experience and expertise to develop mechanism to address the areas listed above. FDA is requesting information to support the development of a six-month pilot to improve FDA’s communication surrounding a food safety threat. The sources (submitter) is expected to address: 1. How a food safety communication pilot will improve communication. 2. What mechanisms would be used to incorporate novel communication techniques. 3. published rates. Disclaimer FDA’s does not intent to publicly disclose vendor proprietary information obtained during this sources sought. To the full extend that it is protected pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act and other laws and regulations, information identified by a respondent as “Proprietary or Confidential” will be kept confidential. It is emphasized that this sources sought is for planning and information purposes only and is NOT to be construed as a commitment by the Government to enter into a contractual agreement, nor will the Government pay for information solicited. Interesting firms may submit a website or a five (5) page limit, 12-point font size, 1 inch margins; Authorized document formats include Adobe (.pdf), Microsoft Work (.doc) or Rich Text Format (.rft). to the attention of the contracting officer.

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