How to verify your cleaning program

Welcome to this week’s HACCP Mentor Review.

This week we are going to look at chemical material safety data sheets, how to verify cleaning in your food business and what type of evidence you should provide to auditors to close out any corrective action requests (CARs) you received in your audit. As usual, we will also do a wrap up of this week’s food recalls and food poisoning outbreaks.

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How do you define what clean is?

Verifying the level of cleanliness can be vastly different from person to person. As part of any cleaning pre-requisite program there needs to be an element of verification – checking that the cleaning has been undertaken and that it has been undertaken to an appropriate level.

To decide on an acceptable level of cleaning, you really need to take into consideration any potential hazards that may result of substandard cleaning. The best way that I was ever taught on how to define clean and verify clean was through 3 considerations – sight, smell and touch.

  • If you can’t see it – as in you can’t see any build up, grime, dirt, dust, food matter
  • If you can’t smell it – as in you can’t smell any filthy, putrid or abnormal smell (especially from and around drains and bins).
  • If you can’t touch it – if you were to run your hand over a piece of food equipment or say bench top, you can’t feel any grit or matter.
Week in Review HACCP Mentor

 

Food Poisoning Outbreaks

We have a few outbreaks to report and update this week. The XL Foods Inc Canada E.Coli outbreak continues with 15 confirmed cases of E.Coli 0157 being reported by The Public Health Agency of Canada.

It started as an international recall of smoked salmon by Foppen in the Netherlands and now morphed into over 500 cases of Salmonella Thompson associated with the product being reported in both the Netherlands and the USA. The product was supplied to Costco in the US was recalled at the beginning of the month.

A new outbreak for the week comes from Clark County Washington where there has been 21 confirmed cases of Salmonella with another 55 probable cases linked to a Mexican restaurant called “On the Boarder”.

 

Food Recalls

There have been food recalls in the past week associated with salmonella and listeria, metal contamination and packaging defaults.

The following products were recalled due to the potential for salmonella contamination:

  • Nature’s Recipe® Oven Baked Biscuits with Real
  • Clef Des Champs brand Organic Ground Ginger (Canada)
  • Xan Confections brand Peanut Butter Chocolate products (Canada)
  • S & P Company Su-nun Crush Roasted Thai Red Pepper
  • Flannerys Natural and Organic Supermarkets located in Queensland, Australia recalled Flannerys Own Almonds Insecticide-Free
  • Nina International recalled its brand of Ground Hot Pepper

 

Sunland continues in the media with a further recall expansion to include raw and roasted peanuts, both in-shell and shelled. Several food businesses continue to recall their own products based on this expansion. A lot of food manufacturers producing ice cream products have been greatly affected this week and issued their own recalls.

 

Food Recalls Reviewed

  • Hannaford Supermarkets issued an alert to their customers due to undeclared allergens on the product labelling for Red Velvet Cake Truffle and Triple Chocolate Cake Truffle.
  • Four Seasons Dairy Inc, recalled Herring Fillets “Atlantic Recipe” in oil due to Listeria monocytogenes.
  • Prager Leg Ham was recalled by Mikes Meats (located in the Australia Capital Territory) due to listeria monocytogenes.
  • Tyson Foods, Inc in Pine Bluff, Arkansal. recalled Honey BBQ Flavored Boneless Chicken Wyngz because of misbranding and undeclared allergens. Buffalo Style Boneless Chicken Wyngz were packaged in bags meant for Honey BBQ Flavored Boneless Chicken Wyngz.
  • Kelloggs in the USA recalled varieties of Kellogg’s Mini-Wheats due to metal contamination.
  • Kraft Foods Group, Inc. recalled its Jalapeno variety of Kraft String Cheese due to the possibility that a thin layer of plastic film from the package may remain adhered to the product. The packaging default could potentially cause a choking hazard.

To check out full details on any of the recalls that we have mentioned please visit www.foodproductrecalls.com

 

Action of the Week

Check that your chemical material safety data sheets are current. As a general rule, MSDS’s should be within 5 years of the document date. This one really is a no brainer if you want to reduce the amount of corrective action requests that you get in a third party audit to any of the GFSI standards or your local food safety requirements.

 

Providing CAR evidence to your auditor

This one has got me on my high horse this week. I seem to have had lots of evidence sent to me to close out CARs raised in recent BRC, SQF and HACCP audits but none of the evidence is relevant in addressing the actual non-conformance raised. You need to go back to the requirements of corrective action requests and make sure you comply. State what you are going to do to fix and rectify the issue now. Send this evidence to the auditor. Do a root cause analysis on why the issue occurred in the first place and put in a suitable action so it doesn’t happen again. To give you an example:

If the audit standard states you must complete annual micro testing on your finished product and you haven’t done it – you will be required to send in the testing report to be able to have this type of CAR closed out. Telling me as an auditor that the product is not scheduled until x date means nothing to me if you haven’t done it in the past 12 months. If you are not capturing the product testing within the correct time frame you need to amend your testing schedule.

 

Food Safety and Quality Compliance Weekly Wrap Up

Well that wraps up this week’s food safety and quality compliance review. If you think these reviews are helping you to keep up-to date in as little time as possible, let me know and leave a comment below this video or post. Thanks again for watching, I’m Amanda Evans and I will talk to you next week.

 

 

 

 

1 thought on “How to verify your cleaning program”

  1. Nirmalendu Barui

    HACCP mentor bulletin is essential at food processing industry who are very much consius about food safety & quality mgmt.

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