We may never know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but we’re going to look at both of them over the next two weeks. At the risk of inciting a philosophical debate, we are choosing to start with eggs. Did you know that production of eggs has more than doubled since 1990, with nearly 1.4 Trillion eggs being produced in 2018? That equates to over 175 eggs per human being per year. A problem in eggs could impact a lot of people!
Hazard Question #5 – Historically, Salmonella has been the most frequently reported issue in eggs, but from July through November 2017 another issue dominated the industry and triggered massive recalls, especially in Europe. What was it?
Hint: If you had access to HorizonScan you could find the answer in a matter of seconds by doing a search on eggs, entering the date range described above in the chart filter, then clicking on the #1 issue shown in the resulting bar chart. We’ll show you what that looks like next week when we provide the answer.
The good news is that according to HorizonScan, no inspection agency in the world has reported a recurrence of this issue since March of 2018, which suggests that even though it was pretty catastrophic when it happened back in 2017, it’s probably no longer an issue that you need to spend a lot of money and resources controlling. That’s the beauty of having access to the accurate data contained in HorizonScan: you can efficiently target your budget to focus on the issues that are genuine threats to the supply chain right now, and not waste your resources controlling issues that may no longer pose a significant threat, or being unaware of new issues that do.
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Kind regards,
The HorizonScan Team at FoodChain ID
Answer to last week’s Quiz – What are the most commonly reported hazards in Cashews, Macadamias and Pine Nuts?
While Aflatoxins are far and away the most commonly reported hazard in tree nuts as a group, Salmonella has historically been the most commonly reported issue for these three nuts. (See HorizonScan summary charts below.) The good news is that unlike Aflatoxins, Salmonella can easily be mitigated with a process control such as a thermal kill step.
