Tag Archives: HAACP

Food in compost pile

Strategies to Reduce Food Loss and Waste

By Food Safety Tech Staff, Nicolle Portilla
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Food in compost pile

Food waste is a major problem that negatively impacts the environment. While the world wastes about 1.4 billion tons of food every year, the U.S. discards more food than any other country in the world: nearly 40 million tons every year. That’s estimated to be 30% to 40% of the entire U.S. food supply. And that excess food often ends up in landfills where it contributes significantly to CO2 emissions.

A 2021 report from the EPA on the environmental impacts of food waste estimated that each year, U.S. food loss and waste embodies 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (million MTCO2e) GHG emissions (excluding landfill emissions)—equal to the annual CO2 emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants. EPA data also show that food waste is the single most common material landfilled and incinerated in the U.S., comprising 24% and 22% of landfilled and combusted municipal solid waste, respectively.

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Restaurants and food manufacturing companies all over the country are making it a priority to reduce their food waste and loss. Below, we outline the most effective strategies—as well as resources available—to help food manufacturers and restaurant staff cut food loss and waste in their facilities.

Train Cooking Staff to Make Waste Reduction Priority

Make waste reduction part of your business culture. Start with the leadership and have them employ waste reduction throughout the entire organization.

Food prep is an area that can contribute to food waste; your suppliers may be able to help. “We work with a company that includes black beans in their burritos and burrito bowls,” says Kari Hensien, president of Rizepoint. “Because the supplier was providing those beans in a size that was greater than the recipes called for restaurant employees were just dumping the whole bag in because it was ‘close enough.’”

Not only did this affect the quality of the end product, it resulted in increased costs and food loss. In similar cases, employees may throw out the excess in a can or package if it contains more than a recipe requires. “Working with your supply chain to optimize packaging to correspond with the formulation of your recipes can drive significant cost savings and reduce food waste for the business,” says Hensien. “You can also raise awareness with your staff of the importance of following that recipe and what to do with the nonstandard size materials. For example, saving it for the next batch rather than throwing it away.”

Improve Food Storage Standards and Follow Regulations

Ensure that the cooking staff and waiters know how to properly store food and use items promptly to prevent produce from spoiling. “So often food waste at retail occurs because employees are not following simple quality control techniques,” says Hensien. “Whether it’s the holding temp for food you’ve prepared or maintaining the temps for food you are storing, you want to make sure that you are reinforcing the basics of having a solid quality control HACCP program in place for doing those temp checks.”

Use Every Part of Food Products

You can use your food more efficiently and cut costs by utilizing every part of meat products, fruits, vegetables, dairy and grains. Have the cooks use every food scrap. For example, bits of tomatoes left over after making burgers can get used up in sauces or salsas.

You can use bones and vegetable leftovers to make chicken broth for a tasty noodle soup. Do you have bread that’s no longer super fresh? Then make some breadcrumbs to sprinkle on top of a fish filet or croutons for a salad.

Restaurants and food manufacturers are also finding creative ways to partner with other businesses to repurpose and make use of their leftover food products. “Are there other facilities that would take food scraps off your hands for a cost to put it into something else?” asks Hensien. “For example, a company may be willing to take your lemon peels and make them into disinfectants. Through creative collaborations you can reduce your food waste and help another company produce their product or service.”

Compost to Cut Food Waste

Composting is a great sustainability strategy for your organization. Add old bread, vegetable and fruit peels, egg shells and coffee grounds to a compost pile or work with a local composting company to take your leftovers. You can also forge partnerships with local farms and gardeners who will take you compostable materials to develop and use your nutrient-rich compost.

Legislation is making it both necessary—and easier—for food businesses to take part in composting programs. California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont have passed laws that restrict the amount of food waste going to landfills. Vermont’s “Universal Recycling Law,” which went into effect in July 2020, bans food scrap waste entirely.

Pending legislation in California, Colorado and Massachusetts would establish programs to fund private-sector composting and organic collection programs. In addition, several states including Tennessee and Washington, and cities like Los Angeles and Madison, Wisconsin, have created food waste task forces to reduce waste by creating composting education and infrastructure.

“You can often partner with a set of local nonprofits and/or local state agencies that will help you with a solution where they will come and get your food scraps or you can drop them off at a certain location. This does require some logistics and coordination but oftentimes we’re finding that there are simple solutions with local nonprofits available that are already in place,” says Hensien.

Inspect Your Food Deliveries and Work with Local Suppliers

You will need to check every food delivery sent to your place of business. Only accept food deliveries with fresh ingredients and nothing that looks like it’s about to spoil. Work with high-quality delivery services and certified suppliers, who follow all appropriate food safety protocols.

Also, focus on seasonal produce and ingredients from the local area, when possible. “Businesses can optimize their supply chain geographically, especially for the fresher items such as tomatoes and lettuce,” says Hensien. “The closer that supplier is to its retail destination, the lower the transportation costs and the greater the likelihood that the product will arrive in a good quality state.”

Donate Food to the Hungry

Donate excess food that is still edible to local food banks, soup kitchens and homeless shelters to feed the hungry or partner with “food rescue” initiatives that bring excess food from retailers and restaurants to people in need. Oftentimes, these organization will pick up the unused food from your business.

“A lot of those nonprofits are actively searching for partners because food insecurity in the U.S. is at an all-time high and donations to those food pantries and soup kitchens are at an all-time low,” says Hensien.

Start by connecting with your local nonprofits. You can also find U.S.-based food rescue organizations in your region here.

Use Tech Tools to Predict Ordering Quantities

A key step in reducing food loss and waste is ensuring you are ordering only the ingredients you will need and can use. “The simplest thing an organization can do to reduce loss and waste is to marry their operational data—what they are using—with their transactional data—what they are selling” says Hensien.

There are technologies and tools that will help you track historical trends and predict your sales, but tracking this data can be done manually or in spreadsheets as well.

Identify Areas of Waste or Loss

One of the best ways to reduce food waste at food manufacturing plants is to utilize a tracking system. Pay attention to the data with the help of software, such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool.

You will have the information you need regarding packaging, shipping and production. The data found via a tracking system can help you define areas of waste and inefficiency. You can then target those areas to decrease food waste.

There are also self-assessment tools available to help both you and your suppliers identify areas of food loss and waste. “Our industry is notorious for saying you should do an LCA assessment and then implement an FLW protocol into your auditing program, and everyone just sees: ‘Oh gosh, I’ve got to send another auditor into all these locations and do an bunch of work to get this up and going,’” says Hensien. “But you can start with simple self-assessments that you can easily assign as a task with very little overhead.”

You can download self-assessment resources through the FLW as well as the EPA, which offers a Food Assessment Guidebook and Toolkit for Reducing Wasted Food & Packaging.

By involving your entire team in the goal of reducing food waste and loss, the industry can have a significant impact in reducing food insecurity, improving profitability and protecting the environment.

 

Why LIMS Is a Necessity, Not a Nicety

By Dr. Christine Paszko
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How a laboratory information management system can facilitate safety testing and regulatory compliance within a food processor’s lab.

The food industry is under pressure to produce high-quality products while adhering to stringent microbiological testing standards controlling costs and meeting regulatory compliance goals. Food companies face a number of regulations and requirements, including those related to Good Manufacturing Practices, nutritional labeling, HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), public health security, the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, and FSMA. For laboratories that offer products globally, the Global Food Safety Initiative focuses on continuous improvement of food safety management systems to ensure confidence in the delivery of safe food to consumers. Many companies face these regulatory challenges armed with a stable and secure laboratory information management system (LIMS) and laboratory automation solutions. LIMS solutions can provide a cost-effective means to ensure that product standards are met, product is delivered as quickly as possible, and managers and staff have the tools to effectively do their jobs. While there are many commercially available LIMS solutions, it is critical that laboratory managers perform due diligence to ensure that the system they select will be successful in the lab. Some ways in which an LIMS vendor can differentiate itself includes: having ISO 9001 certification offering a qualified staff, being a certified Microsoft Gold Partner, and offering software solutions based on the latest technology that allows users to leverage the Internet, tablets and smartphones.

Implementing an LIMS: The problem and the solution

A microbiology laboratory of a meat processor was looking for ways to eliminate transcription errors, and shorten its analysis turnaround time and reporting time through automation. The company was experiencing increasing sample volume, which would require hiring additional resources that had to be trained and deployed. However, taking on more personnel was not an option. To manage its growing sample volume, the company was seeking an LIMS that could also interface with its laboratory instruments and manage plant samples from multiple remote sites. An evaluation of current processes revealed multiple opportunities to automate data entry, reporting, and eliminate dual and triple entry while accelerating and automating data handling and test scheduling.

Samples, including raw materials, finished products and plant samples, were sent from multiple plants to the laboratory daily for environmental monitoring. The current manual system was labor intensive and required that all processes be manually checked and re-checked for accuracy prior to data release. Data was entered into the manual systems multiple times. Instrument data was not integrated with the reporting and the lab was increasing its sample volume for the instruments alone by up to 900 samples per day. Primary reasons for investing in LIMS automation included:

•    Having the ability to do more work with the same resources (removing manual tasks)
•    Enhancing data management into a single, secure data base
•    Meeting regulatory compliance goals
•    Operating under enhanced efficiency and data quality
•    Facilitation of standards and increased communication across their operations
•    Cost savings

Automation reduces transcription errors, increases productivity, enhances data quality and accelerates result delivery. Faster turnaround translates into faster product release, longer shelf-life and ultimately, cost savings.

Then: Prior to implementing the LIMS, samples would arrive at the food processor’s laboratory each morning. From there, they were manually sorted, paperwork was organized, and checks were conducted to verify receipt of samples.

Now: LIMS has significantly streamlined the process. Each morning, a work list is printed from the LIMS, identifying which samples will be received from the plants. The samples are organized and prepared for analysis and placed on the instruments with barcoded work lists for rapid and accurate set up.

The microbiology laboratory leveraged an automated food pathogen detection system to test for Listeria spp., Salmonella spp. and E.coli:0157:H7 on various sample types. Prior to automation, the manual steps of loading the sample IDs, scanning the print outs from the instruments, and then entering the data into reports with secondary review required 40 to 45 minutes per batch of 60 samples.

 Two of the four instruments interfaced with a LIMS.

Implementation of the LIMS has reduced report review time to five minutes. The data is received by the LIMS, and the email is automatically parsed and ready to receive the samples. The emailed worksheets, which are also automatically imported into the LIMS, eliminate several manual steps, including the time in which the laboratory team spent cross-checking samples with the paperwork and calling for missing samples. In this case, the automation has reduced the amount of paperwork and significantly streamlined the process. Now the laboratory knows which samples it will be receiving each day and can quickly match the samples to previously imported work lists.

Once the samples are loaded on the pathogen detection instrument to match the work list from the LIMS, the screening is conducted and the data is sent back to the LIMS, with the final analysis report completed automatically.

 
 An example of a final report automatically generated from the system, which is also automatically emailed.

 

Conclusion

Primary enhancements to implementing an LIMS include higher data quality and significant time savings (a conservative estimate: LIMS typically saves customers between 25-45% of time on their operations). On the instrument integration alone, the automation saved 35 to 40 minutes of work per batch (a batch contains 60 samples), and a typical day includes 10 to12 batches, or up to 720 test results per day. Conservatively, if we allot 35 minutes per batch and 10 batches per day, the time savings are nearly six     hours daily, and this is only from interfacing four instruments. Additional time savings are also realized as a result of reducing data errors.

An alternative solution to hiring additional staff to work in the lab involved examining the benefits of automation to leverage existing resources and allowing them to be more productive. This path eliminated mundane tasks and allowed existing lab staff to focus on the LIMS  (managing, tracking and organizing data) and automation (barcoding, scanning, instrument integration, automated email imports and automated reporting). Laboratory staff was trained on-site and received follow-up training at the LIMS Boot Camp. As a result, workflows were streamlined, sample throughput was accelerated, and the lab experienced faster turnaround times.

Other benefits of deploying a new LIMS in the laboratory include increasing data security, having an audit trail if any approved and validated results required a change, full traceability, facilitating standardization across the organization, reducing the amount of paper forms, and automating the release and reporting process.

About the Author

Dr. Christine Paszko has extensive expertise in LIMS, laboratory automation and food safety testing. She is currently the VP of Sales and Marketing at Accelerated Technology Laboratories, Inc., (ATL). Prior to joining ATL, she worked at Applied Biosystems. She was responsible for the creation, marketing and sales of molecular test kits that leveraged the TaqMan technology to detect major foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli 0157.

Dr. Jim Fredericks, Chief Entomologist & Vice President of Technical and Regulatory Affairs, National Pest Management Association
Bug Bytes

Why is Pest Management Critical to Food Manufacturing Operations

By Dr. Jim Fredericks
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Dr. Jim Fredericks, Chief Entomologist & Vice President of Technical and Regulatory Affairs, National Pest Management Association

Every manager of a food manufacturing plant knows that food safety cannot be compromised under any circumstances and that the entire process is dependent on a number of aspects working effectively, efficiently and in a healthy and safe manner. However, no process is foolproof and any breakdown in the manufacturing process could lead to contamination. Some of the most pervasive contaminants come as a result of insects, rodents and other pathogens finding their way into the plant. It is for this reason that pest management is critical to food manufacturing.

Depending on the type of food product and how it is processed, there are ample opportunities for pests to associate themselves into the food manufacturing life cycle – be it during the growth cycle, at harvest, within the mode of transportation, during material preparation and final processing.

Fortunately, today’s scientific equipment provides the ability to detect amounts of contaminated materials in a given finished product down to the nanogram and “zero” continues to get smaller and smaller with each advancement in chemical [contaminate] detection technology. However, as plant science and seed chemistry improve, so does yield production. With this production increase comes additional processes that create opportunity for pest threats to enter food-manufacturing operations. In order to maintain a safe and clean facility both the food manufacturing facility manager and pest management personnel must address each issue head on.

There are a number of factors that pose challenges to proper pest management in food facilities such as the time of operation [some pests prefer daytime, while others prefer nighttime], production cycles [season of harvest can denote degree of pest infestation], maintenance schedule [how often do lines or plants shut down for cleaning and up keep], delivery schedule and flow of raw materials [when and how they enter and leave] throughout the plant. The addition of other factors, like moisture levels and temperature extremes within the construction elements of the plant, can create ideal conditions for pest harborage and nesting areas.

The world is a smaller place today and food transportation can be accomplished by multiple sources; food products are now shared across borders and oceans in a much shorter time frame than before. Due to the potential introduction of a new pest species or plant disease, it is crucial that facilities and their pest management partners develop a common platform for risk assessment, analysis and preventive controls to achieve success. Having the ability, discipline and quality control processes in place to intercept or disrupt this potential hazard are extremely important. The pest management professional is a line of defense that supports the food manufactures by inspecting, performing audits, identifying and preventing, improving and correcting hazards or situations that could cause damage, contamination or illness.

The consequences of not taking pest management seriously can be devastating to a food manufacturing company – resulting in fines, production shutdowns, closures and even bankruptcy filings. Not to mention a tarnished reputation, shaken confidence and public scrutiny of the brand and finished product. Certain failures may even create a system wide product recall compounding the negative effects.

The words ‘and’, ‘team’, ‘partner’ and ‘critical’ to describe the approach of a pest management professional and food manufacturing facility management and are key in understanding the role each plays – one to cut the risks and the other to protect, both helping each other accomplish the desired level of food safety.

Being proactive about food safety, including pest management, is paramount in protecting life and health. In the food safety industry food manufacturers work with a lot of different standards, protocols and regulations, such as Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs), Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HAACP). The standards are risk-based in order to address the issues as risks to public health and food safety due to activities of pests.

FDA is trying to level the playing field on food safety with the implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) – the biggest change to food safety laws since the 1930’s – helping to bring together the various practices and governing agencies under a common goal – preventing food borne illness with sustainable and accountable improvements in food safety using prevention based controls.

As part of FSMA compliance, the pest management professional must be an integrated member of the food safety team. Thorough knowledge of the plant’s quality programs, manufacturing practices, approved product lists and sanitation programs is critical to success. Both pest management professionals and food manufacturing operations managers should also be aware of new pest control products and application techniques to fully offer the facility the best pest management program possible.

In all food manufacturing facilities, the pest management professional and manufacturing operations facility manager should both be prepared to:

  1. Work together with open communication.
  2. Provide training to both sides, whereas the plant team trains the pest management professional on the facility and processes with expectations of the service agreed upon. The pest management professional trains the food manufacturing team on basic pest management and where this fits into their food safety program and HACCP system.
  3. Set written expectations of services, treatments as well as a process for proper documentation. Utilize an appropriate accountability system of mapping and numbering all points of inspection, monitoring and treatment.
  4. Both parties should remain open to conversation regarding new and innovative techniques and treatment options that utilize the preventive intent of FSMA in conjunction with the concept of Integrated Pest Management (IPM).

The bottom line is that foodborne illness is largely preventable if everyone can be held responsible and accountable at each step they own for controlling hazards that can cause illness.