Tag Archives: costa

Roy Costa: How to improve produce safety

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How can the system of audits and marginal inspections be improved to make fresh produce safer?

With 29 dead and 139 from listeria in cantaloupe, the question has taken on new urgency, although that cycles – many in the farm-to-fork food safety system have exceedingly poor memories once product is flowing again, with prevention soon relegated to nostalgia. Remember the outbreak of 1996? 2006? 2011? (insert date and commodity here).

Roy Costa writes in his Food Safety & Environmental Health Blog that third party audits are best implemented when there are regulatory controls over the audited operations, thus underpinning  them.

Costa concludes the best alternatives to improve produce safety and the third party audit process may include:

• buyer financing and coordination of the audit;
• unannounced audits;
• Food and Drug Administration involvement in the third party audit process including training and oversight;
• risk-based frequencies of regulatory compliance inspections, 2nd and 3rd party audits, and reassessments based on severity;
• transparency of all audit and inspection findings by all concerned;
• validated microbial standards; and,
• expanded use of 1st and 2nd party audits.

The complete article is available here.

Costa strikes: Orlando s Action 9 investigates dirty dining

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WFTV — Action 9 in Orlando, Florida – goes behind the kitchen doors of local restaurants, where state inspectors kept finding conditions that could make somebody sick. Have these restaurants cleaned up their act?

I love the erstwhile drama of local news.

Bugs crawling on dish towels; raw fish on the floor; cooked food at risky temperatures. Those are some of the conditions Action 9 uncovered at local restaurants that had routinely failed state inspections.

Retired state restaurant inspector Roy Costa (right, exactly as whown) joined Action 9’s Todd Ulrich inside the kitchen at Dim Sum Feast near Orlando.

Just three months ago, the state shut Dim Sum Feast down temporarily after an inspector found raw waste water on the floor and employees tracked it through the kitchen.

While Action 9 saw improved conditions, the inspector found big problems remain. He said shrimp thawing in stagnant water and frozen chicken stacked on racks could breed bacteria.

In the cooler was uncovered, uncooked meat that was stored over ready-to-eat food and that leads to cross contamination. Costa spotted undiluted bleach in a bottle to spray counters. He called that extremely risky.

“[He] sprays it on a food contact service area and prepares something and soaks it and then serves it to somebody,” Costa explained.

New China Buffet is a restaurant that flunked seven state inspections in two years and it would have failed Action 9’s test again.

Managers at New China Buffet and Dim Sum told Action 9 they’ve improved and their kitchens are safe.