Gisli Herjolfsson, Controlant
FST Soapbox

How Supply Chain Digitalization and Data Helps Prevent Costly Recalls

By Gisli Herjolfsson
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Gisli Herjolfsson, Controlant

Recalls are something that food brands plan for but hope to never experience. They are an important public safety issue, but they also have a significant economic impact as well. At best, a product recall is a benign mistake that causes little more than aggravation and inconvenience for a few angry customers. At worst, the consequences can be tragic, both in terms of human and financial impact.

Industry research conducted by the Food Marketing Institute and Grocery Manufacturers Association places the average cost of a single recall at $10 million. That calculation includes only the direct costs of a recall. For the full, long-term costs, including direct and indirect liabilities, you’d need to further account for the immediate loss in sales, litigation costs, as well as any long-term damage caused from a loss in consumer confidence in your brand.

Consumers’ relationship with food is ever changing. They demand transparency about its contents, origin and safety, and for good reason. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 1 in 10 people are sickened yearly from eating contaminated food, leading to 420,000 deaths. Consumers have long memories for businesses that poison them. The larger the size of your company and the more attention it receives, the potentially greater impact on your long-term business prospects. With the recent E. coli outbreaks tied to romaine lettuce, food safety is top of mind for consumers, and it is impacting entire market segments.

One of the easiest ways to prevent recalls associated with perishable foods is to ensure that food and beverage products are safely produced and continually kept at the right temperatures. Sounds easy, right? In reality, it is far from it.
Gaining end-to-end supply chain visibility can help you prevent costly recalls altogether. Data that today’s technology provides will be important for mitigating risk and protecting a brand’s reputation.

Get Proactive

The idea of prevention is paramount to FSMA. It’s clear that the FDA expects that once a producer or supplier discovers that something has gone wrong, they go back and figure out exactly what happened so that they can put measures in place to prevent it from happening again.

While current FDA guidelines and various EU safety regulations generally require that food can be tracked one step up and one step down the supply chain, this remains a very siloed approach to traceability and is open to risks—risks that producers, food retailers and restaurant brands cannot afford to take.

For USDA-regulated products, HACCP employs a similar process. Prevention is key, and if your monitoring measures miss an issue that could compromise food safety, you’ll need to go back and determine the root cause of the problem.
A cold food manufacturer can do a lot to control risks under its own roof, but how do you avoid costly recalls with ingredients or with temperature abuse after a product leaves the facility? Regulations or not, knowing where your ingredients and food products come from and being assured of their safety is critical in protecting your brand and company from the financial and reputational damage caused by a food recall.

Looking forward in the supply chain, maintaining the cold chain is necessary for many products, including fresh produce, frozen and deep frozen foods, and also those that must be kept at room temperature but still require temperature control. Even if you and your suppliers are incredibly careful and practice prudent safety measures, you may not have full visibility over who else is handling your products. If temperature mishandling by someone else necessitates a food recall or results in a food safety incident, it is still associated with your brand, even if you weren’t the direct culprit.

For many food retailer and restaurant chains, it is common practice for them to share their internal food safety guidelines with their suppliers and partners, and require that they prove a product’s source of origin, lifespan, how those products are stored and transported from point A to point B, as well as the environmental conditions in which foods are kept. Allowing suppliers and logistics partners to self-manage their supply chain does nothing to proactively ensure that they and a food brand aren’t in the headlines due to a food safety incident.

Digitally Connect the Supply Chain

This is where technology and data can play a critical role in managing your temperature-controlled food and beverage products. More and more food enterprises are utilizing Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that talk to the internet so they can collect supply chain data into dashboards and access it on demand.

IoT can be considered as a central nervous system for the supply chain. Through IoT, you can track shipments or trace temperature, moisture or other factors that can have an impact on food quality. Not only can you discover problems more rapidly with this technology, you can narrow the scope of recall. For businesses transporting temperature-sensitive products, this means they can manage product movement data in real-time and respond to issues before they lead to a food safety incident or product waste.

From a food production standpoint, IoT solutions can substantially reduce recalls from issues like labeling, processing and contamination. One of the primary causes of a food recall is microbiological in nature, with the majority of cases involving fruits and produce. IoT data can help detect issues further upstream in the supply chain and, since products will change hands several times before they reach a consumer, it can give you a complete picture of the product’s lifecycle—something that cannot be done with clipboards and ad hoc or periodic inspections.

Through cloud technology, food businesses can connect their end-to-end supply chain, analyze data, discover trends, illuminate weak points and directly respond to them to improve their overall processes.

Track and Trace Everything

Continuous and consistent tracking and tracing through technology not only simplifies recalls, it helps prevent them altogether. The only thing worse than being faced with a food recall is not knowing which products are affected or where exactly they are located.

Real-time temperature monitoring and product movement traceability technology can give you the confidence that foods are continuously kept at their required temperatures and remain safe for consumption. When you need to track and trace an ingredient or product, time is often of the essence. Delays may mean more resources and efforts are spent in producing something that may be rejected, or worse, recalled, or that the potentially impacted product isn’t isolated in time.

The digital integration of suppliers and other partners is vital if a food enterprise wants to have more control over its cold chain. Consumer demand for social responsibility and ethical business operations means that businesses need to provide greater visibility and transparency into the origins of their products. With today’s supply chains, having data—essentially, a horizontal IT layer that lets people share and access data—removes the barriers of communication among stakeholders.
IoT serves as a tool to remove the barriers to collaboration between food manufacturers, food logistics businesses, restaurant and food retail chains, regulatory agencies, and the end consumer. It increases the transparency of information and helps to deliver better products throughout the food supply chain.

Get Started

Acknowledging that most food companies have limited resources, food brands can still face their efforts only on the suppliers and customers that are of the greatest concern. Often this means looking at the combination of “high-risk product” with “high-risk supplier/partner” and prioritizing that part of the supply chain. This prioritization will help food brands allocate their resources and focus their time and money on the highest risks to their customers and brand. Once they’re able to reap the benefits of a preventive food safety program, they’re better able to justify allocating additional resources to other parts of the cold chain.

While IoT, cloud monitoring and traceability technology has been around for some time, real-time data is now becoming standard. Traditionally, the cost of IoT technology and data infrastructure could be quite expensive. However, different business models like subscription are on the rise, which lower the cost of entry for new prospects and can connect a broader range of products, not only high-value goods.

Although many food brands already have some proactive food safety programs in place, it only takes one incident to lead to a major food recall—even if it isn’t your company’s product—and it can negatively impact your business.
As an industry, food brands need to continue raising the bar in terms of what is considered standard and “best practice” when building an effective, proactive food safety strategy. Utilizing best-in-class technology can ensure the delivery of safe foods to the market, prevent recalls, protect business interests, and most importantly, protect consumers.

Gabriela Lopez, 3M Food Safety
Allergen Alley

Method Acting: Comparing Different Analytical Methods for Allergen Testing and Verification

By Gabriela Lopez-Velasco, Ph.D.
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Gabriela Lopez, 3M Food Safety

Every day, food industries around the world work to comply with the food labeling directives and regulations in place to inform consumers about specific ingredients added to finished products. Of course, special attention has been placed on ensuring that product packaging clearly declares the presence of food allergens including milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soy, sesame and mustard. (Additional food allergens may also be included in other regions.)

But labeling only covers the ingredients deliberately added to foods and beverages. In reality, food manufacturers have two jobs when it comes to serving the needs of their allergic consumers:

  1. Fully understand and clearly declare the intentional presence of allergenic foods
  2. Prevent the unintended presence of allergenic foods into their product

Almost half of food recalls are the result of undeclared allergens, and often these at-fault allergens were not only undeclared but unintended. Given such, the unintended presence of allergenic foods is something that must be carefully considered when establishing an allergen control plan for a food processing facility.

How? It starts with a risk assessment process that evaluates the likelihood of unintentionally present allergens that could originate from raw materials, cross-contact contamination in equipment or tools, transport and more. Once the risks are identified, risk management strategies should then be established to control allergens in the processing plant environment.
It is necessary to validate these risk management strategies or procedures in order to demonstrate their effectiveness. After validation, those strategies or procedures should then be periodically verified to show that the allergen control plan in place is continually effective.

In several of these verification procedures it may be necessary to utilize an analytical test to determine the presence or absence of an allergenic food or to quantify its level, if present. Indeed, selecting an appropriate method to assess the presence or the level of an allergenic food is vitally important, as the information provided by the selected method will inform crucial decisions about the safety of an ingredient, equipment or product that is to be released for commercialization.

A cursory review of available methods can be daunting. There are several emerging methods and technologies for this application, including mass spectroscopy, surface plasmon resonance, biosensors and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Each of these methods have made advancements, and some of them are already commercialized for food testing applications. However, for practical means, we will discuss those methods that are most commonly used in the food industry.

In general, there are two types of analytical methods used to determine the presence of allergenic foods: Specific and non-specific methods.

Specific tests

Specific methods can detect target proteins in foods that contain the allergenic portion of the food sample. These include immunoassays, in which specific antibodies can recognize and bind to target proteins. The format of these assays can be quantitative, such as an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) that may help determine the concentration of target proteins in a food sample. Or they can be qualitative, such as a lateral flow device, which within a few minutes and with minimum sample preparation can display whether a target protein is or is not present. (Note: Some commercial formats of ELISA are also designed to obtain a qualitative result.)

To date, ELISA assays have become a method of choice for detection and quantification of proteins from food allergens by regulatory entities and inspection agencies. For the food industry, ELISA can also be used to test raw ingredients and final food products. In addition, ELISA is a valuable analytical tool to determine the concentration of proteins from allergenic foods during a cleaning validation process, as some commercial assay suppliers offer methods to determine the concentration of target proteins from swabs utilized to collect environmental samples, clean-in-place (CIP) final rinse water or purge materials utilized during dry cleaning.

ELISA methods often require the use of laboratory equipment and technical skills to be implemented. Rapid-specific methods such as immunoassays with a lateral flow format also allow detection of target specific proteins. Given their minimal sample preparation and short time-to-result, they are valuable tools for cleaning validation and routine cleaning verification, with the advantage of having a similar sensitivity to the lowest limit of quantification of an ELISA assay.

The use of a specific rapid immunoassay provides a presence/absence result that determines whether equipment, surfaces or utensils have been cleaned to a point where proteins from allergenic foods are indiscernible at a certain limit of detection. Thus, equipment can be used to process a product that should not contain a food allergen. Some commercial rapid immunoassays offer protocols to use this type of test in raw materials and final product. This allows food producers to analyze foods and ingredients for the absence of a food allergen with minimum laboratory infrastructure and enables in-house testing of this type of sample. This feature may be a useful rapid verification tool to analyze final product that has been processed shortly after the first production run following an equipment cleaning.

Non-Specific Tests

While non-specific testing isn’t typically the best option for a cleaning validation study, these tests may be used for routine cleaning verification. Examples of non-specific tests include total protein or ATP tests.

Tests that determine total protein are often based on a colorimetric reaction. For example, commercial products utilize a swab format that, after being used to survey a defined area, is placed in a solution that will result in a color change if protein is detected. The rationale is that if protein is not detected, it may be assumed that proteins from allergenic foods were removed during cleaning. However, when total protein is utilized for routine verification, it is important to consider that the sensitivity of protein swabs may differ from the sensitivity of specific immunoassays. Consequently, highly sensitive protein swabs should be selected when feasible.

ATP swab tests are also commonly utilized by the food industry as a non-specific tool for hygiene monitoring and cleaning verification. However, the correlation between ATP and protein is not always consistent. Because the ATP present in living somatic cells varies with the food type, ATP should not be considered as a direct marker to assess the removal of allergenic food residues after cleaning. Instead, an analytical test designed for the detection of proteins should be used alongside ATP swabs to assess hygiene and to assess removal of allergenic foods.

Factors for Using One Test Versus Another

For routine testing, the choice of using a specific or a non-specific analytical method will depend on various factors including the type of product, the number of allergenic ingredients utilized for one production line, whether a quantitative result is required for a particular sample or final product, and, possibly, the budget that is available for testing. In any case, it is important that when performing a cleaning validation study, the method used for routine testing also be included to demonstrate that it will effectively reflect the presence of an allergenic food residue.

Specific rapid methods for verification are preferable because they enable direct monitoring of the undesirable presence of allergenic foods. For example, they can be utilized in conjunction with a non-specific protein swab and, based on the sampling plan, specific tests can then be used periodically (weekly) for sites identified as high-risk because they may be harder to clean than other surfaces. In addition, non-specific protein swabs can be used after every production changeover for all sites previously defined in a sampling plan. These and any other scenarios should be discussed while developing an allergen control plan, and the advantages and risks of selecting any method(s) should be evaluated.

As with all analytical methods, commercial suppliers will perform validation of the methods they offer to ensure the method is suitable for testing a particular analyte. However, given the great diversity of food products, different sanitizers and chemicals used in the food industry, and the various processes to which a food is subjected during manufacturing, it is unlikely that commercial methods have been exhaustively tested. Thus, it is always important to ensure that the method is fit-for-purpose and to verify that it will recover or detect the allergen residues of interest at a defined level.

Chelle Hartzer, Orkin
Bug Bytes

Filthy Flies Can Put Your Operations at Risk

By Chelle Hartzer
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Chelle Hartzer, Orkin

When we think about dirty pests, cockroaches are usually the first to come to mind. But while the conditions they thrive in are disgusting, flies breed and feed in the filthiest areas. Their lifestyle means their bodies can be covered in dangerous, potentially disease-inducing pathogens, which can be spread anytime they land on a surface or their body comes into contact with something.

House flies are born as maggots, emerging into their larval stage from tiny eggs laid anywhere decaying organic matter can be found. After splashing about in the grime and decay and consuming just about anything they can find, the larvae leave their food source and crawl around seeking out cool, dry, protected places. A shell forms around the pupae, where they remain for a brief time before turning into adults. This entire process takes less than two weeks from egg to breeding adult. Once they’re adults, house flies take off in search of more decaying organic matter and moisture to lay their eggs in and continue the processes.

Essentially, a house fly spends its entire life cycle either crawling around in filth or flying around to find new sources of filth. Add in the fact that they reproduce rapidly, and it’s easy to see why they’re a food safety threat. But they’re not the only species of fly that plagues food processing facilities, as fruit flies and moth flies are two other incredibly common fly species that love to make food processing facilities a new home.

To prevent flies, the first step is to take a close look at your current integrated pest management (IPM) program and ensure your program focuses on taking a proactive approach to mitigating pest issues. But before discussing the specifics of how to protect a facility from these fly invaders, it is important to know how and why they get into a facility in the first place. Each species has slightly different locations where they’re likely to be found, which should be monitored closely to ensure they don’t become hot spots.

Let’s look at the three most common fly species most likely to plague a food processing facility:

House Flies

House flies are persistent and active. Each time they pause to rest on floors, walls or ceilings, remember they’re potentially dropping off disease-causing pathogens. House flies are known to transfer more than 100 pathogens resulting in ailments like typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera and dysentery. They’ll feed on any moist human food, animal food, garbage, carcasses and just about any other wet or damp organic material. Flies detect a food source and hone in on it, which is why they’ll be looking for a chance to invade your food processing facility.

Moth Flies

Although moth flies feed on organic matter and sewage, they’re found in moist areas coated with nutrient-laden organic material. They are sometimes called drain flies because (you guessed it) they are often found in drains. They love the buildup that sticks around the pipes, and once they start reproducing, they can be a nuisance to eliminate. Usually, you’ll never see drain fly eggs and larvae because they drop irregular masses of egg sacs that hatch into larvae, which then live in the gelatinous film inside drains. From there, they mature into pupae and then flying adults, which is when you’ll start to notice them. This is why regular drain cleaning, with a foaming cleaner, is important in controlling these fly issues.

Fruit Flies

Like drain flies, fruit flies are named aptly. They’re most attracted to rotting or decaying fruit and vegetables, but they also enjoy fermented items like beer, liquor and wine. Aside from the products themselves, fruit flies may also breed and develop in drains, garbage disposals, trash cans and even mop buckets. Fruit flies are also known for being a major risk to contaminate food with bacteria and other pathogens. If there is food waste present, fruit flies want to be there. Finding their source and eliminating it is especially important for successful control.

Now, the most important strategy for preventing flies—and most pests in general—is to implement a robust sanitation plan. Flies are looking for food and water to survive, so any source of organic matter or moisture is going to be likely to attract them. And once they’re inside, flies are likely to stay there. Most won’t travel more than a few hundred feet from the spot they were born in their entire lifetime. While small flies are more likely to be found breeding inside facilities, large flies are likely to be breeding outside and flying inside structures.

Consider these tips, as they can help you keep flies and other pest threats away:

  • Make sanitation a priority. Sanitation is one of the most important ways to help reduce pests. Flies love any damp organic matter they can find, so clean up messes as soon as they occur. And don’t forget to take out the trash on a regular basis. That means at least daily. Don’t miss cleaning the insides of trash bins, liners often leak and a buildup of material can be present underneath them.
  • Swap outdoor lighting. Use outdoor sodium-vapor lights, especially near entrances/exits to the inside of your facility. Lights can be placed away from the building to draw flies away and reduce populations at the same time. Ensure that inside lights don’t shine out at night and attract night flying insects and flies in.
  • Install automatic doors. Automatic doors give flying pests a smaller window of opportunity to get indoors by reducing the amount of time that doors remain open. For greater effectiveness, install two sets of automatic doors that only open once the other is closed to create a vestibule. Installing air curtains behind these doors can also help block pests from finding a way inside. Air curtains alone aren’t perfect, but they can help some.
  • Inspect loading and unloading areas. Shipment areas are a prime location for flying pests to wander in. Make sure all doors form a tight seal when shut and are not allowed to stay open for extended periods of time.
  • Seal cracks and crevices. Just about any gap, no matter how small, can be big enough for flies to find a way inside. Door sweeps and weather stripping can be installed to minimize these gaps. You can also use weather-resistant caulk to seal gaps on the exterior of your building, although this will likely take some time and a team effort at larger facilities.
  • Clean drains on a regular basis. Even if you don’t have a lot of “wet” processing, all drains, including break room, restroom, and locker room drains need to be cleaned. Small flies can develop in as little as seven days, so weekly cleaning is a must.

Implement these sanitation and exclusion efforts as part of your ongoing IPM program. With flies, sanitation cannot be stressed enough. They are living and breeding in conditions that need to be cleaned up, inside and outside. As with any pest issues, it is important to contact a pest management professional if it seems things are getting out of hand. If you’re seeing flies daily inside the building, that’s probably a good sign that your products may be at risk!

Deirdre Schlunegger, Stop Foodborne Illness
Food Safety Culture Club

With Retirement in 2019, A Farewell from Deirdre Schlunegger

By Deirdre Schlunegger
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Deirdre Schlunegger, Stop Foodborne Illness

It is hard to believe that nearly nine years have passed since I joined Stop Foodborne Illness to lead the organization. I will be retiring at the end of May 2019, and many memories will journey with me for the rest of my days on planet earth. I have learned so much through constituents, colleagues and new-found friends. It is so humbling and such a deep honor to serve our constituents. I hold deep gratitude for the individuals and families who give so much during their time of grief while working to improve food safety; they give so freely of their time to share their stories to make a difference for others. It is only for their stories and their sharing that the organization exists. Engaging with food safety professionals throughout the food industry in an effort to improve food safety has been gratifying, and working alongside food safety advocates and consumer groups has been humbling. The staff members at Stop Foodborne Illness are relentless in their commitment and hard work, and they will be remembered. I hope that we leave a mark, a legacy that moved the needle in some small way towards the improvement of food safety. And I hope that the momentum will continue, that there will be people who will not be sick because of the work that has been done under my leadership alongside others, and that the needle will continue to advance forward so that others don’t have to experience the intense and deep pain that comes from being ill or watching a loved one suffer.

I would like to thank Stop’s Board of Directors, who have spent countless hours devoting their time and efforts in their commitment public awareness.

Thank you to everyone who has served as a guide, mentor and friend over the years. You will be remembered. Thanks for all that you do to advance food safety!

Editor’s Note: We would like to that Deirdre for her contributions to Food Safety Tech over the years in the Food Safety Culture column and for her service to the industry. We wish her the best of luck! Deirdre’s cause will continue, as the publication will continue to welcome contributors to this special column.

Shawna Wagner, DNV GL
FST Soapbox

Did You Write “NONE” for Biological, Chemical and Physical Hazards in Your HACCP Plan?

By Shawna Wagner
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Shawna Wagner, DNV GL

Ok, ok I know what you are thinking, another article about HACCP. You have been HACCP certified since 1999 and doing this for years—why read this article? That golden sticker on your certificate does not last forever. Industry has changed, approaches to food safety have changed, and your HACCP plan should have evolved. Did it?

Biological, chemical, physical, biological, chemical, and physical hazards. If you are any part of the quality assurance or HACCP team, you can recite this in your sleep. Do you recite economical and radiological hazards? These are one of the most commonly missed items in a plant’s HACCP plan that I have witnessed when auditing. This, of course, applies only to plants that must comply with FSMA, but does it truly hurt to think about including it in all plants? I mean, we are all in this for food safety, right?!

In speaking about radiological hazards, most of the time I will have site management tell me that I am not by a power plant so there are not hazards to my operations. If you are a producer of vegetables and fruits, or a plant receiving these kinds of ingredients, water and even soil can be a home to radioactive hazards! Radioactive minerals are naturally occurring and unless you know where to start, items such as Cadmium may sneak up on you in unacceptable levels. Economical hazards are, in my opinion, a bit easier to research. When looking at economical hazards, we are basically trying to prevent intentional contamination to gain or profit. In more common terms, this is often referred to as food fraud. Olive oil, fish, and even spices have been known to be the victims of food fraud. There are plenty of informational sites out there to help get you started on writing your hazard analysis for food fraud, however some I have found you do have to pay for.

Another common non-conformance that I see missing in HACCP audits is what I would call inputs and outputs to the HACCP flow chart. Inputs are: Water, compressed air, ice and even steam. Outputs are: Waste, animal feed or by-products. This is not an all-inclusive list, but certainly these examples could bring a new level of hazards to your facility, especially if you did not include them in your hazard analysis. Even worse, if you did include them but decided to write in your hazard analysis that word…dare I even say it… “NONE”: You wrote “none” for biological, chemical, and physical hazards. More than likely you have a pre-requisite program, letter of guarantee, or something that controls these hazards, and you absolutely want to include these in your HACCP plan. Give yourself credit! Auditors and customers alike truly want to see that you have documented and given thought to each of your processing steps. Make sure you take that HACCP flow chart and walk around your facility to ensure you have captured the needed information that will give you the best chance of catching items that can be missed. The plan is only as strong as the time you put into it, which leads me to my next point: Your HACCP or Food Safety Team.

The notorious HACCP team. You have one, the head of the team is the QA manager, and you have team members to cover the multi-disciplinary basis. So, what’s the problem? Well, maybe none, but remember the comment about the golden sticker on your certificate? It’s the same thought process here. Your team must be continually updated and educated to keep up with the ever-changing world of food. That 1999 HACCP certificate is no longer valid in the eyes of some customers. I have seen many customers requiring that HACCP be retrained every five years. For the sites that must follow FSMA rules and regulations, have you completed your Preventative Controls Qualified Individual training? You should have, and who is their backup? It takes much planning and money to make this happen, but it is all a crucial step in maintaining food safety and your HACCP plan.

We all know that our programs and processes are not good for forever and that change is inevitable. There are always avenues for gathering information and accessing it. You must be willing to go out and get the resources that will place an upgrade on your food safety management system, as waiting for it can sometimes cause gaps and non-conformities. The big question is: Did you put in the hours?

Doug Sutton, Steritech
Retail Food Safety Forum

What Attracts Customers to Your Restaurant, and What Could Keep Them Away Forever?

By Doug Sutton
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Doug Sutton, Steritech

The most recent numbers from Black Box Intelligence reflect what has been an ongoing trend for the last several months—improving same store sales. Sounds like great news, right? It could be, if another key metric wasn’t trending in the wrong direction.

Traffic numbers in restaurants are on a very steady down slope. In the third quarter, traffic was down 1.3%, and in October, traffic slowed down by another 2.2%.

The bottom line: Fewer people are dining out, but they’re spending more money.

For now.

Earlier this year, a survey of 500+ consumers asked them several questions about their preferences and experiences when dining out, as well as how they are making their decisions. The results could help restaurant operators adjust their customer experience to help bring more traffic through the door.

Despite Low Traffic Numbers, Americans Still Dine Out Frequently

Consumers have a lot of choice when purchasing a prepared meal these days: Restaurants or prepared foods from a grocery store? Dine in or take out? Fast food, fast casual, or full-service dining? The list goes on and on.

Sixty percent of the above-mentioned survey takers had dined at a restaurant, whether sit-in or delivery, once a week or more frequently. Another 25% reported doing the same two to three times a month.

But there is stiff competition.

Nearly 70% of the same group has purchased prepared foods (pre-made sushi, fried chicken, sandwiches, etc.) at a grocery or convenience store in the last month, indicating that the convenience of prepared foods is taking root in American life. This is an increase from a similar survey conducted in 2016, when slightly more than 65% of respondents said they had purchased a prepared meal from these sources.

What Are Customers Really Looking for in a Restaurant?

It should come as no surprise, that the driving factor for choosing a restaurant is the quality of the food. Respondents of this survey were provided a list of 10 areas of food safety and operational items to choose from and asked them to choose up to five that matter to them most when choosing a restaurant. Food quality and taste was the frontrunner by far, but restaurant cleanliness was second.

The third item on the list might surprise people. It wasn’t speed of service, or order accuracy, or service quality—while they all do matter to customers, it’s their previous experience with a location or chain that matters most.

When Customers Want Answers about a Restaurant, They Go Online

Social media and online reviews are playing an increasingly important role in how customers share their experiences with restaurants. The news about social media and online review sites is good for restaurants. If you’re doing a good job with your customer experience, your customers are willing to talk about it.

Respondents were extremely likely to use social media to share a restaurant experience on a social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram: 58%, said they would be very or somewhat likely to share a restaurant experience on social media. Even better news? Among those who fell into these two categories, nearly two-thirds say they are more likely to share a positive experience than a negative one.

The same holds true for online restaurant review sites, such as Yelp! And OpenTable. While fewer customers say they are very or somewhat likely to share their experience on an online restaurant review site, 49% of those who use review sites once again say that a positive experience is more likely to garner a review than a negative one. A full 66% of those who would be likely to use an online review site are likely to post a positive experience over a negative one.

Especially in the case of online restaurant review sites, this is important. Why? Because nearly three-quarters of respondents sometimes or often use restaurant review sites to help select where they will dine. Among those respondents, the online review carries significant weight in making their decision. Nearly 25% say online reviews are extremely or very influential in their dining decisions, while another 41% qualified them as moderately influential.

Delivery Problems and Who Customers Blame

Most restaurant operators know that there are big dollars to be had in the delivery space. But, the results of this survey indicate that restaurants have a bit of work to do.

Well over half (58.9%) of those surveyed had ordered food for delivery in the six months before the survey. Of those, nearly 30% experienced a problem with their order: Food being cold, wrong food, took too long to deliver the food, etc.

Here’s the important takeaway for restaurants offering delivery: Whether you manage delivery yourself or use a third-party delivery service, customers that experience problems place the fault squarely on the restaurant. Among those that experienced a delivery problem, 79.55% say the restaurant was to blame. That’s important because with third-party delivery service, the restaurant does lose some control over time it takes to deliver, food security, and more.

Foodborne Illness Outbreaks Have a Long-term Effect on Revenue

A 2018 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health put a price tag on foodborne illness outbreaks for restaurants: Anywhere from $4,000 up to $1.9 million wrapped up in “lost revenue, fines, lawsuits, legal fees, insurance premium increases, inspection costs and staff retraining.”

The survey results discussed in this article show that the effects of a foodborne illness outbreak could linger for much longer than anyone truly realizes.

Nearly 30% of respondents said they would never eat at that location if they knew a foodborne illness outbreak had happened there; 24% said they would stay away for between one to six months, and another 18% said they would stay away for six months to a year.

The responses get more dramatic when chain restaurants have foodborne illness incidents. When asked if they would avoid eating at other locations in the chain if a single location was involved in an outbreak, more than 31% said yes, and a whopping 50% say maybe. The majority of respondents would give the chain a second shot, however. Only 19% say they’d never eat at any location in the chain again; more than half (over 58%) report that they would only stay away for between one month and one year.

If multiple locations of a chain are involved, the percentage of respondents that would avoid eating at other locations in the chain more than doubled to more than 68%. The bulk of those who would stop eating at other locations in the chain (31%) say they’d never eat at the chain again, while another 18.5% would avoid the chain for longer than a year. Another 23% say they’d stay away for six months to one year.

Customer Experience Investments Can Reap Big Rewards

This survey revealed plenty of other details about what customers are looking for—what cleanliness factors drive them crazy, what they think of health department scores (and which groups are really paying attention), what really turns them off when they read it in a review—but the real takeaway is this: Restaurants willing to invest in customer experience and a culture of food safety will reap the rewards from customers.

Mahni Ghorashi, Clear Labs
FST Soapbox

Why the Food Safety Industry Needs the Cloud

By Mahni Ghorashi
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Mahni Ghorashi, Clear Labs

Cloud computing and storage, the breakthrough technology that once dominated headlines, conferences and CIOs’ strategic plans, is now commonplace in most industries. That is not to discount the journey it took to get here, though. This easy acceptance wasn’t always the case, and in fact, some of the world’s most important industries are lagging behind.

Food safety is one such industry that stands to gain the most from adopting cloud technology but continues to rely heavily on manual processes, paperwork, and cumbersome on-premise databases. These methods are seen as fail-safe, proven by history to be effective enough and compatible with the overarching goals of the industry. We’re suffering from the age-old adage: If it isn’t broken, we don’t need to fix it.

While the food safety industry has good reasons for taking a more conservative approach to new technology, I’d argue that the most pressing risk to our industry is the failure to invest in innovation. In our own attempts to avoid risk, we’re actually exposing ourselves to far greater losses both in protecting consumers and new opportunities.

A Path Forward For Food Safety

The food safety industry is changing, and changing rapidly. However, despite advances, the industry still faces major challenges. We’ve seen more than 200 recalls just this year. An average recall costs $10 million dollars in direct costs alone. On average, it takes 57 days to recall food, according to a report by the Office of Inspector General.

At the same time, we’re beginning to generate more data than ever, with technologies like blockchain and next-generation sequencing coming online in a big way. We’re about to experience a data explosion arguably bigger than in any other industry. A single NGS test can give industry officials hundreds of millions of data points per analysis, and routine pathogen tests are happening at high volumes around the clock.

This amount of data cannot be contained in the spreadsheets and on-premise databases of today.

The hesitation to adopt cloud-computing is not unfounded, given the initial fear around outages and security, and a disbelief that the technology could ever be as reliable and secure as their existing systems. And the hesitation is even more understandable when you consider that food and beverage is the third-most hacked industry. The damage from these breaches can be extensive, with reports that 70% of hacked food and beverage companies go out of business within a year of an attack. There is a substantial cost for lax security or prolonged outages.

Clearly, any solution has to be comprehensive, and our justifications for switching systems have to be all the more clear. But we cannot as an industry sit idle.

The food safety industry has an opportunity to learn from those who have gone before us and build a stronger, more robust cloud infrastructure.

We’re starting to see this shift take place – some of the top poultry manufacturers have already made the leap into cloud computing. They and others will prove that the value of making the move far outweighs the risk.

Quality Control and Consistency

Right now, it’s not uncommon for food safety employees to record their observations via paper and pencil. In a best-case scenario, these professionals are forced into spreadsheets with limited interoperability. In either scenario, there are huge amounts of friction when it comes to sharing information and, in fact, data can easily be lost as inboxes fill, software crashes, or papers get buried in the shuffle.

By enabling instantaneous data sharing, the cloud makes collaboration across an organization easily accessible for the first time. This, in turn, boosts productivity and also guarantees a higher degree of consistency in both process and results.

Employees can instantly share results, communicate across departments, and easily control permissions and access to information, allowing others to iterate on or apply their findings in real time.

Speed Across an Organization

The drive to increase efficiency actually underwrites the entire food safety industry. Experts are constantly asking how we can be faster at assessing risk, managing recalls, and generally running a business. These questions are only becoming more important as the threat of foodborne illness continues to rise.

The cloud enables greater speed in tracking food information inside and outside of the lab. Perhaps more than any other tool, cloud technology is going to allow the food safety industry to more quickly and effectively manage recalls.

Technology that allows companies to immediately update information company-wide without the burden or drag of an unwieldy IT infrastructure is valuable. Technology that gives you easily interpretable results, so that you can make quick decisions for the good of public health safety is valuable.

Cloud technology enables both. You could easily process terabytes worth of data and spit out easy, comprehensible results that would have otherwise taken days or weeks to produce.

This ability, which on its own is attractive, is especially important as you get into more complicated pathogen tests. For example, with traditional serotyping, a substantial portion of calls are subjective. The speed of cloud computing can take away some of that guesswork.

Dramatic Cost Savings

Not only does the cloud offer a faster system for storing and accessing information, but it also offers cheaper infrastructure, usually an offshoot of its speed. A survey of more than 1,000 IT professionals found that 88% of cloud users pointed to cost savings and 56% agreed that cloud services had helped them boost profits. Additionally, the absolute cost of the cloud is continuing to drop, improving margins.

With the cost savings enabled by the cloud, the food safety lab no longer has to stay a cost center. Adopting cloud technologies can create more wiggle room in a company’s budget and free up resources for ambitious experiments, new product development, and other activities that contribute to the bottom line of the organization.

Security and Regulatory Advancements

The cloud also allows companies to more easily cooperate with HAACP and FSMA regulations. With all of this organizational data easily available and updated in real time, organizations can ensure they’re keeping pace with regulatory requirements by easily producing traceability records and managing compliance requirements across multiple locations and vendors, for example.

While better, more transparent data management company-wide has always been the draw of cloud, the technology has been crippled by simultaneous concerns about security. Food safety executives feel stuck between wanting to comply with best practices and needing to protect sensitive and valuable information.

Fortunately, food safety has waited long enough. Even as recently as 2015, cloud breaches of major organizations’ databases were still making headlines. However, the technology has come a long way in a short time. Cloud providers are beginning to implement automatic checks of systems to analyze threats and identify their severity.

These advancements speak to the food safety industry’s primary pain points, security and speed. By solving for both, the cloud has reached a maturity worthy of the food safety industry.

The Future: Data Pollination

Finally, the cloud makes it much easier to share data across departments, organizations, and even entire industries.

We’re entering an era of data pollination. What I mean by that is there an opportunity to mesh food safety data (genomic data, label information, etc.) with other forms of data—human microbiome data, for instance, to create “personalized” food, enabling consumers to eat ideal foods based on their genetic makeup. While this trend has already taken off, it could be further improved and better validated by bringing food and genetic data out of their silos.

On the opposite end of the production line, data pollination could also help farmers, who have huge amounts of data at their fingertips, understand how they can play a larger role in food safety. If data can enable farmers to produce bigger yields, data can also certainly help farmers prevent any environmental causes of food safety on the farm itself.

Bringing together the data from the entire lifecycle of food—from farmer to consumer—can only be a good thing, powered by the cloud.

Conclusion

The food industry should not look at the task of updating their infrastructure to the cloud as a burden or an extra cost—it’s an investment and when done right, it can provide far greater returns. We have the advantage of late adoption and learning from the implementation mistakes and successes.

This isn’t just incremental improvement territory—we’re talking about making a quantum leap forward in our industry.

Karen Everstine, Decernis
Food Fraud Quick Bites

Recent Notable Incidents

By Karen Everstine, Ph.D.
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Karen Everstine, Decernis

We developed a system that tracks food fraud records using four categories: Incidents, inference records, surveillance records and method records. Food fraud incidents are documented occurrences of fraud that include contextual information about location, perpetrators, timeframe, geographic location and other characteristics. In many ways, incidents are the gold standard of food fraud records. However, there have been unsubstantiated reports of food fraud that were subsequently discredited (such as the “plastic rice” scandal of a few years ago). For this reason, for every incident we capture, we assign a “weight of evidence” classification to provide our assessment of the strength of the evidence. For example, incidents reported directly by regulatory agencies with supporting documentation will generally be assigned a “high” weight of evidence classification.

We also work diligently to avoid “double counting” food fraud incidents, although at times this can be challenging. Incidents may be reported in multiple media outlets and, at times, the reports may not include enough information to determine if it is a new report or related to an issue already reported. We cross-reference the dates and locations of reports, along with information about the ingredients and adulterants, to help ensure that isolated food fraud cases are reported as one incident.

Food fraud, Decernia
Food fraud incidents since 1980. (Source: Decernis Food Fraud Database)

Incidents we have captured in the past two months include $14 million of counterfeit wine discovered in China, which was reportedly based on a tip off. The Carabinieri and ICQRF in Italy discovered wines with added flavorings and other additives. The Guardia di Finanza in Italy also seized adulterated extra virgin olive oil. Counterfeit liquor was discovered in Russia and bootleg liquor containing methanol caused deaths in Malaysia.

Expired (possibly rotting) eggs intended to be powdered and used in food production were discarded by regulatory authorities in India. A customer in China reported that expired carrots were being re-labeled with new dates. Adulterated milk was discovered in Pakistan. In Kenya, reports surfaced of sodium metabisulfite being used on meat to enhance its appearance. Finally, in the United States, two companies were indicted for importing giant squid and selling it domestically as octopus (which usually has a higher retail price) over a period of three years. A review of these reports illustrates how challenging it can be to collect and standardize food fraud information, especially when it is reported in media sources.

Chelle Hartzer, Orkin
Bug Bytes

Not-So-Fantastic Pests and Where to Find Them

By Chelle Hartzer
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Chelle Hartzer, Orkin

Although no two food processing facilities face the exact same pest pressure, there are a few common pests you’re likely to spot. Depending on the type of pests in the surrounding area, different spaces in a building will be more at-risk for an infestation. Pests will feed on and contaminate product, and get into equipment, if undeterred. And considering many pests can be a potential health and safety threat, prevention is important to help protect your bottom line.

Instead of reacting to pest issues, adjust your integrated pest management (IPM) program to take a proactive approach to preventing the following six common pests.

Rodents

Some of the most clever and resilient creatures in the pest world, rodents are a versatile threat to food products. Usually brown or gray, mice and rats can compress their bodies to fit through holes and gaps the size of a dime and a quarter, respectively. Once inside, they reproduce rapidly. A single rat or mouse can produce more than 32 offspring per year. In addition, they can use their sharp teeth to gnaw through packaging and leave urine and feces droppings everywhere they go. All of this makes them an absolute terror once indoors. They’re smart enough to know hiding from humans is their best option, and they’ll even learn from unsuccessful trapping attempts.

Cockroaches

These notorious crawling insects are contaminators, too. Roaches love to get into dirty areas and run all over food contact surfaces, equipment and products, potentially dropping off disease-inducing pathogens on everything they touch. Cockroaches can fit through tiny gaps by flattening their bodies, making them tough (but not impossible!) to keep out. They tend to avoid coming out in the open during daytime hours, as they prefer to hide in the dark. If you spot one running around during the day, then it may be a sign of a larger infestation behind the scenes.

Flies

When flies detect a potential food source, they’re going to head straight for it. Stringent sanitation is the best way to minimize attractants, and keeping doors and other openings closed can help, too. Preventing flies is important, because they’re twice as filthy as cockroaches. In fact, more than 100 pathogens are associated with the housefly alone. These pathogens are transferred when the fly lands on a surface, contaminating the area. If flies are a threat, you should have fly lights placed strategically to reduce the population and monitor where they’re coming from.

Indian Meal Moths

This tiny insect feeds on a wide range of raw and finished goods, and leaves behind frass (insect droppings) that that can lead to major loss of products. If you don’t see the pest itself, which can be reddish-brown and silver-grey in color, you may notice the silk webbing spun by larvae. When someone notices this, immediate action is necessary, as it means the moths are reproducing and may be spreading amongst products in close proximity.

Sawtoothed Grain Beetle

Unable to penetrate most packaging, sawtoothed grain beetles hunt for holes in packaging, which can be one millimeter in diameter, and lay eggs near the opening. Larvae then squeeze through the hole once hatched and begin feeding on product! Although they prefer processed food products like bran, chocolate and oatmeal, they’ll feed on just about anything they can get into. About three millimeters in length, these beetles love moldy, damp conditions, so minimize those attractants as much as possible.

Ants

Everybody has seen or been around ants before, but are you aware that they carry bacteria on their bodies capable of contaminating food? What starts with a few foragers can escalate quickly, as ants leave behind an invisible chemical trail leading other ants straight to a food source. Ants will feed on just about anything depending on the species, so identification is key. Generally only a few millimeters in length and ranging in color from black to red, ants can establish colonies under a building’s foundation, on lawns or in out-of-sight locations indoors.

Watch Out for High-Risk Areas

Understanding the biology of pests helps us to understand what they’re looking for and where they’re most likely to be hiding. Generally speaking, pests are attracted to places able to provide them with the three things they need to survive: Food, water and shelter.

Food doesn’t necessarily mean actual food products of course, as some pests—like cockroaches, flies and ants—will feed on any organic matter they can find. Remember, that includes garbage!

But taking out the trash and ensuring dumpsters are far away from the building aren’t the only ways to reduce pests. Quite the contrary, pests have a myriad of different hiding spots that should be checked by facility staff and a pest management professional regularly.

For starters, don’t overlook the break room. It’s easy to forget to take out the trash, which should be done at least daily depending on waste output. Break rooms also frequently have sinks with drains where food buildup can cause odors that are attractive to pests. Drain flies love this! Wipe down countertops and sweep/vacuum/mop daily to ensure larger food crumbs and debris are taken care of, and make sure your staff knows to clean up any spills immediately. Don’t forget those vending machines—when was the last time they were moved and cleaned underneath and behind?

Equipment can be a hot spot for pests, too. Insects, especially stored product pests, will hide beneath and behind heavy machinery. Pests don’t want to be exposed out in the open, so they’ll hide in small gaps and crevices. And if there is food waste or moisture present, watch out! Those attractants will prove irresistible if allowed to linger for too long, so make sure your cleaning schedule includes sanitation in and around equipment. Never overlook those hard-to-reach areas, or pests will make you pay.

Speaking of hard-to-reach areas, walls are often popular harborage areas for pests. Rodents are perhaps the most dangerous, as they pose a health and safety threat to employees and can contaminate product. Worse still, wiring in walls looks like roots to rodents. They’ll often chew through and create sparks—a potential fire hazard. Rodents are just one of many pests happy to live in your walls, so contact a professional if you notice activity.

Even once food is produced, packaged and stored, pests are still a threat! Stored product pests, like the Indian meal moth and sawtoothed grain beetle, can get into packaged products and live in it. They’ll feed and contaminate the product, then move onto the next, proving costly when large batches have to be thrown out. Thankfully, there are monitoring devices like pheromone traps to help identify where these begin to pop up, but again, you’ll want a professional’s help to ensure these tools are effective.

Don’t wait for pest sightings to occur before taking action. The best approach to pest prevention is a proactive one, and there’s not an insect or animal alive who can outsmart a trained pest management professional. Lingering issues will prove costly with time, as a product infestation or plant shutdown would be a painful hit on your business’s bottom line. Instead, create a plan that accounts for these pests and high-risk areas around your building, and you’ll be able to rest easier knowing you’re prepared for pest invaders.

Gabriela Lopez, 3M Food Safety
Allergen Alley

Five Steps to Creating a Successful Validation Study

By Gabriela Lopez-Velasco, Ph.D.
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Gabriela Lopez, 3M Food Safety

Manufacturing large volumes of food product that must be safe for human consumption with finite resources is, simply put, a demanding responsibility. For many food brands, having dedicated production lines is not always an option, so lines are often shared amongst a variety of food products. A potential problem arises when products containing allergenic foods are manufactured on the same equipment as other products, and those allergenic foods are not meant to be declared in the product label. As a result, residues of the first product manufactured may move to the next product. Known as direct cross-contact contamination, this issue can have a severe adverse impact on allergic consumers.

Cross-contact contamination can occur at various stages of production, but it’s direct food cross-contact in shared production lines that is often found as a particularly significant food safety hazard. Addressing cross-contact through effective cleaning procedures is one of the most critical allergen management activities in establishing preventive controls and minimizing the potential of unintentional presence of food allergens. Allergen cleaning validation enables food manufacturers to evaluate that their cleaning procedure is adequate when it comes to removing ingredients from direct food contact surfaces.

Cleaning validation consists of generating data to demonstrate that allergenic foods are removed from direct food contact areas to a pre-defined acceptable level. A basic cleaning validation design consists of determining the residual level or presence of allergenic food before cleaning (baseline), and then assessing the level of the allergenic food after cleaning.

If the cleaning procedure exists in several steps (i.e., more than one rinse or purge, as with dry cleaning) additional testing to assess the level of allergens between cleaning stages and in the final product can also be incorporated. It is important to remember that a single validation study may not be applicable for an entire site operation. Different production lines within a food production site may require an individualized validation analysis. This determination will depend on the cleaning process as well as the formulation of the products being manufactured.

There are five important considerations for establishing a successful validation study:

  1. Set up a team and assign a leader to carry out the design of the validation. Involving relevant personnel with knowledge in the product formulation, manufacturing process, equipment design and cleaning and sanitation regimes may provide valuable insight to identify processes that should be included in the validation. It may also bring to light critical sampling points in the equipment that should be considered.
  2. Determine the scope of the study. This is where you describe and justify which equipment, utensils, cleaning regime and production processes will be validated. It may be wise to group different processes or select the worst-case scenario. For example, you might choose to focus on food production equipment regarded as hard to clean or equipment that contains the highest concentration of the allergenic food.
  3. Design a sampling plan. This is a critical prerequisite before starting a validation study. The plan should be clearly defined, with critical sampling points and locations prescribed to challenge the effectiveness of the cleaning regime and to find evidence of allergenic food presence. In both open equipment and equipment that will be dismantled as part of the cleaning regime, it is important to select sites where food can get trapped, as well as other sites that are hard to clean. Also consider other surfaces that can be a source of direct cross-contact like protective clothing and utensils. For clean-in-place (CIP) systems, wash water should be collected from the onset of cleaning and then at intervals leading up to the final rinse water. This helps to demonstrate that allergen food levels are diminishing, thereby validating the use of CIP analysis as a verification method. Note that it is important to consider that the sampling plan for the validation should also reflect the sampling plan that will be used during routine verification. Support from a statistician may facilitate the decision to define how many samples and type of samples (swabs, CIP or final product) should be collected for the validation and how many cleaning runs should be performed to demonstrate validity.
  4. Select a method of analysis. Validation and verification involve the use of a specific method to detect allergenic foods. The selected method should be validated as well, an undertaking most often done by the commercial supplier. Then it should be verified by the food processor that the method is fit for purpose, such that the allergenic food will be recovered and detected under the conditions in which samples are routinely collected. This ensures there will not be interference due to the food itself or due to cleaning chemicals. There are a variety of different analytical methods; most are based in technologies designed to detect proteins. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) and immune-based lateral flow devices (LFDs) offer detection of specific protein targets (i.e., egg proteins, milk proteins, peanut proteins) and are ideal for a validation study. ELISA can provide quantitative data from pre-cleaning, at various intervals during the cleaning process, at post-cleaning and at final product, offering a measurable level of the allergenic food during the cleaning process. Rapid detection through LFDs also allows food processors to assess the presence or absence of a specific protein or group of proteins, but different from ELISA, the result is only qualitative. In either case, these rapid tests may be used for both validation and routine verification. In addition, there are non-specific tests that can detect total protein that may be selected for a cleaning validation study. These tests do not provide specific information about the allergen to be managed, and thus may be more suitable for routine verification. During a cleaning validation study, it is important to include the test that will be utilized for verification and ensure it is also fit for purpose and detects the allergenic food to an appropriate pre-defined sensitivity. This is particularly important if the test is different from the analytical method chosen for cleaning validation.
  5. Establish acceptance criteria. Proteins from allergenic foods may cause an adverse reaction at very low levels. To date, there are very few regions in the world in which threshold or permitted levels for allergens in food are established. Each individual food manufacturer should define a criterion to establish when a surface is clean from allergens after routine cleaning. The limits that are set up should be practical but also measurable and verifiable, thus it is important to define a level with knowledge of the sampling and analytical method selected. The sensitivity of the analytical methods currently available may be used as a criterion to verify that levels of an allergen are under control if they fall below the limit of detection of the analytical method.

Once a cleaning regime has been validated and documented, routine allergen cleaning verification should be performed as part of a monitoring program to demonstrate that the cleaning process in place is effective and that the risk of direct cross-contact is consequently being controlled. The validation should be repeated at defined intervals, often once a year. However, it is expected that a cleaning verification will be performed after each production run and cleaning procedure in order to reflect that the validated cleaning process is still effective. Cleaning verification, along with other allergen management activities, strengthens implemented food safety programs and helps to protect consumers.