Tag Archives: assessment

Food safety culture has jumped the shark: UK develops tool for inspectors

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Food safety culture is often mentioned on the speaker circuit but what does it all mean? We gave it a shot, so has Griffiths and Yiannis.

The U.K. Food Standards Agency has come out with two reports prepared dick.fingers.farleyby a consultant that offers a thorough review of the concept but doesn’t move us any closer to implementation.

And I don’t know why the reports were targeted at inspectors, to help them assess the culture of a food business. Shouldn’t food producers, the ones who profit, be taking the lead on developing case studies, data collection, and innovative techniques to embed food safety culture within their organizations? And brag about it?

Maybe I’m just a bit thick.

“The study aimed to develop a tool which can be used by enforcement officers for those aspects of food safety culture, attitudes and behaviors that
JumpTheShark(1)help officers assess ‘softer’ aspects of risk presented by individual food business operators (FBOs).”

Uh-oh. Writing with dick fingers (‘softer’) usually means uncertainty vagueness, or just lousy writing.

“The first stage of work identified and reviewed existing safety culture assessment tools. A total of 169 questionnaires and tools were identified. A large number of these were variations of safety climate questionnaires and had been used in safety culture research. Fifteen toolkits/questionnaires were shortlisted for potential inclusion in the detailed review. The review of the current tools noted that:

• none of the tools had been developed specifically to assess food safety culture;

• the typologies used for some tools, and elements of safety culture covered, overlap with those noted in food safety culture research;

• most tools have not been developed specifically for micro or small firms;

dick.fingers.stewart• many of the existing safety culture tools have some form of validation; and,

•a large majority of the tools are diagnostic.

The summary also notes a number of tools are intended for completion as a survey of staff. They measure the safety climate rather than specifically diagnose safety culture and mapped advice. This is not considered applicable by inspectors during ‘routine’ inspections of micro or small food businesses.

There’s those dick fingers again.

Key is food must be safe for consumption; a second chance for faulty food? FDA calls it ‘reconditioning’

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JoNel Aleccia of msnbc reports that turning imperfect, mislabeled or outright contaminated foods into edible — and profitable — goods is so common that virtually all producers do it, at least to some extent, sources say.

“Any food can be reconditioned,” said Jay Cole, a former federal inspector who now works as a senior consultant with The FDA Group, a firm that specializes in helping manufacturers comply with industry regulations.

For example, when Salmonella Tennessee was detected last year in huge lots of hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP, a flavor enhancer used in foods from gravy mix and snack foods to dairy products, spices and soups, bulk HVP products from Basic Food Flavors Inc. of Las Vegas, Nev., were allowed to be reconditioned by heat-treating the foods to kill the salmonella, according to the FDA. The reprocessed foods were then distributed and sold.

No question, FDA regulations do permit foods to be reconditioned, said William Correll, the agency’s acting director of compliance. That leeway can avoid both waste and expense, he explained.

“Some things can be adulterated and fixed, and you’re not throwing out food that would otherwise be OK,” Correll said.

The key, however, is that the process must render the food safe for consumption.

“Dilution is not the solution.”

Similarly, companies that propose to eliminate a serious contaminant without addressing the source are turned down. He recalled a seafood firm with faulty bathroom practices that led to canned crab contaminated with fecal E. coli bacteria. Heat-treating would have eradicated the bugs — but not the problem, Correll said.

“If food is adulterated in an unacceptable way, reconditioning won’t fix it,” he said. “You can’t cook the poop out of it.”

When a school lunch supplier repackaged moldy applesauce into canned goods and fruit cups, it drew a sharp warning from federal health regulators last month — and general disgust from almost everyone else.

Correll said mold is tricky because when contamination is extensive, it’s not enough to simply remove the obviously tainted parts and then zap the food with heat.