Arizona Food Safety Specialists, LLC., Food Safety Resources Site www.azfoodsafety.com

Thursday, August 7, 2008

A Food Scientist or Technologist takes information from the scientific fields and APPLIES THAT TO FOOD.

ARE YOU DOING WHAT IT TAKES, WITHIN THE LAW, TO GET YOUR PRODUCTS SAFELY TO MARKET?

ARE YOUR EMPLOYEES TRAINED PROPERLY KEEP ACCURATE RECORDS, SHOULD YOU BE AUDITED BY THE FDA?

WHY are these items below important to your business?

Scientific principles of food handling
Factors important to humans when we eat
Flavor Safety
Appearance Smell
Economic Color
Familiarity Convenience
Consistency Nutrition
Texture Tradition
Freshness Meaning (ethnic, religious)
Consumer Food Concerns
Fat Level
Preservatives
Contamination
Microbial
Preparation
Scientific Concerns
Microbial
Preparation
Contamination
Preservatives
Fat Level
Food Categories
Stable
Semi-perishable
Perishable
Food Deterioration & Spoilage
Microbes
Natural food enzymes
Insects, parasites, rodents
Temperature extremes
Moisture extremes
Light
Chemical reactions
Microorganisms
What kind of microbes are there?
How good or bad are they?
Food Spoilage
Illness
Fermentations
Waste Disposal
Microbial Control
KEEP OUT - Clean and Sanitize
Kill - Heat, radiation
Prevent or slow growth
Why Process Foods
Enhance keeping quality
Microbial Quality
Chemical Breakdown
Macrobiological breakdown (losses)
Theory of Food Preservation
Shift one set of conditions into an unfavorable range for microbial growth.
Produce an wholesome acceptable food.
Why Process Foods
Remove unwanted components (pathogenic microbes, anti -nutrients, toxins, etc)
Packaging must be done for convenience, quantity, sales appeal and protection.
Methods of Food Preservation
Aseptic Handling
Heat
Pasteurization
Boiling
Steam and pressure
Low Temperature
Chilling
Freezing
Dehydration
Drying
Concentration
Lyophilization
Osmotic Pressure
Sugar
Salt
Intermediate moisture
Controlled Atmosphere
Filtration <0.47microns
Chemicals
Acids
Smoke compounds
Antibiotics
Radiation
Ultraviolet 2500 -2800A
Ionizing Radiation - Gamma rays
Microwaves

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Welcome To Arizona Food Safety Specialists Resources Blog

Putting Food Safety and Public Health First!

On the Web: http://www.azfoodsafety.com/

E-mail: steve@azfoodsafety.com

Phone: 520.405.0772
Fax: 520.296.5696

Our company is staffed with Food Safety Specialists to assist you with all of your company's needs! With over 38 years of hands-on experience in industry, government, working with the FDA, the classroom, production and quality assurance, we can provide you with services at competitive rates, designed for your specific needs.

Working with your staff to ensure your company is in full compliance with all FDA regulations! Our standards exceed FDA regulations.

Some of the services we offer:

Nutrition Facts

Lab Setup and Procedures

Sanitation and Procedures Setup

Compliance and Inspections

Comprehensive Plan Review

Process Evaluation, Analysis and HACCP

Food Safety Kitchen and Staff Training

Marketing, Branding, Packaging Guidelines

Regulations and Guidelines

Ensuring Your Company Meets and Exceeds Federal Regulations, Standards and Guidelines

In today's environment, food safety is in the headlines everyday! A company can be ruined overnight by not meeting food safety regulations

Food contamination is more common than you think and is easily prevented when you follow FDA guidelines.

Federal, State and Local Regulations must be met with no room for error

Call us today!

Get the Food Safety answers you are looking for from a seasoned expert in Food Science, Food Law and Food Safety and Toxicology.

The HACCP seven principles

The HACCP seven principles

Principle 1:

Conduct a hazard analysis. Plans determine the food safety hazards and identify the preventive measures the plan can apply to control these hazards. A food safety hazard is any biological, chemical, or physical property that may cause a food to be unsafe for human consumption.

Principle 2:

Identify critical control points. A Critical Control Point (CCP) is a point, step, or procedure in a food manufacturing process at which control can be applied and, as a result, a food safety hazard can be prevented, eliminated, or reduced to an acceptable level.

Principle 3:

Establish critical limits for each critical control point. A critical limit is the maximum or minimum value to which a physical, biological, or chemical hazard must be controlled at a critical control point to prevent, eliminate, or reduce to an acceptable level.

Principle 4:

Establish critical control point monitoring requirements. Monitoring activities are necessary to ensure that the process is under control at each critical control point. In the United States, the FSIS is requiring that each monitoring procedure and its frequency be listed in the HACCP plan.

Principle 5:

Establish corrective actions. These are actions to be taken when monitoring indicates a deviation from an established critical limit. The final rule requires a plant's HACCP plan to identify the corrective actions to be taken if a critical limit is not met. Corrective actions are intended to ensure that no product injurious to health or otherwise adulterated as a result of the deviation enters commerce.

Principle 6:

Establish record keeping procedures. The HACCP regulation requires that all plants maintain certain documents, including its hazard analysis and written HACCP plan, and records documenting the monitoring of critical control points, critical limits, verification activities, and the handling of processing deviations.

Principle 7:

Establish procedures for ensuring the HACCP system is working as intended. Validation ensures that the plants do what they were designed to do; that is, they are successful in ensuring the production of safe product. Plants will be required to validate their own HACCP plans.

FSIS will not approve HACCP plans in advance, but will review them for conformance with the final rule. Verification ensures the HACCP plan is adequate, that is, working as intended. Verification procedures may include such activities as review of HACCP plans, CCP records, critical limits and microbial sampling and analysis.

FSIS is requiring that the HACCP plan include verification tasks to be performed by plant personnel. Verification tasks would also be performed by FSIS inspectors. Both FSIS and industry will undertake microbial testing as one of several verification activities. Verification also includes 'validation' - the process of finding evidence for the accuracy of the HACCP system (e.g. scientific evidence for critical limitations)

Food Safety fallacies can lead to foodborne illnesses. Here are some common fallacies!

1. If it smells bad or looks bad, taste it to see if it is OK. ABSOLUTELY NOT!

Doing this can have serious consequences. The first rule of food safety is - If it looks bad or smells bad, DO NOT taste it, throw it out!

2. Let hot food cool before putting it in the refrigerator

The best way to handle this is to put the food in the refrigerator as soon as possible. The faster a food cools the less likely to spoil. By letting it cool at room temperature, the temperature drops slowly creating a situation favorable to microbial growth.

3. If a food gets moldy, just throw out the moldy portion. This is not recommended

Bread and cheese are the most common foods to become moldy. When mold grows on a product, what you see is only part of the mold.

When mold becomes visible on a product, you are seeing the highest concentration of mold. The mold is normally found throughout a product. Think of mold growing like a spider creating a web or roots to a plant

Moldy food products can cause health problems. Molds can produce toxic substances called mycotoxins. These substances can cause various health problems, especially if one has a compromised or weakened immune system.

For example, if someone is allergic to penicillin, eating moldy bread or cheese is not recommended because one of the molds which grow on bread and cheese is the penicillium species (this is where penicillin comes from)

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Thursday, August 7, 2008

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