Food Safety

In order to comply with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), it’s imperative to shift the focus toward preventing contamination rather than responding to contamination. From process to preparation, it’s important for everyone to adhere to the five major elements of the FSMA: prevention, inspection, importation, response and enhanced partnerships.

Monitoring Food Temperature Throughout the Manufacturing Process

One of the most effective ways to comply with FSMA requirements is by thoroughly monitoring physical factors such as time, humidity, temperature, pH, flow rate and water activity (Aw), a measure of the free moisture in a food. Manufacturing operations such as dehydration, heat processing, freezing, refrigeration and acidification will also impact the state of the food and will require close monitoring. This ensures that, despite mechanical breakdowns, temperature fluctuations, time delays and other factors, the process remains in compliance and won’t contribute to the decomposition or contamination of the food.

During the manufacturing process, it is critical for food to be heated and chilled at the appropriate temperatures. Products such as batters, breads, sauces and gravies should be heated, then either rapidly cooled or subsequently moved to another manufacturing process without delay.

Farm-to-Fork Temperature Monitoring

The FMSA requires farm-to-fork monitoring as a preventative measure. When applicable, companies should institute maximum and/or minimum temperature values to control potential hazards. To minimize the possibility of pathogen development, it is critical to maintain specified temperatures, especially for meat, and accurately measure fluctuations to ensure safe consumption.

TEGAM designs and manufactures durable, accurate temperature measurement instrumentation for the safe production of food products. Our thermocouple thermometers, data logger thermometers, and RTD probes are just a few of our product offerings with food safety applications. Please contact us with questions or to connect with our sales team.

A recent Fortune article places the annual costs of medical treatment, lost productivity and foodborne-illness-related mortality for affected consumers at $55.5 billion. The industry takes a hit as well to the tune of $7 billion in annual costs from food withdrawals, rejections and recalls.

The Food Safety Modernization Act’s Push on Food Manufacturing

The FSMA, signed into law by President Obama on January 4, 2011, extends the existing food safety regulatory environment by adding an emphasis on prevention. For the past 70 years, food safety regulations focused on responding to contamination. The new law requires greater transparency from the entire supply chain and fundamentally changes the way food is regulated in the United States and abroad.

FSMA Compliance with Food Temperatures

Many food processing companies are already in compliance with numerous temperature-related regulations required by the FSMA. For example, new regulations are consistent with multiple aspects of the existing global Pathogen Reduction, Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (PR/HACCP), and Current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) requirements. Together, they provide an already established structure for temperature monitoring, data retention and instrument cleanliness.

To monitor quality and process improvements, the FSMA provides an improved, prevention-focused framework that is consistent with PR/HAACP, cGMP and other existing regulations. The framework also supports companies’ efforts to monitor and remedy food safety issues. PR/HAACP requirements and other specific USDA guides already supply temperature regulations for processing meat.

Foodborne Illnesses

Foodborne illness refers to illnesses caused by pathogens as reported by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Although the CDC reports on 31 different pathogens, the five listed in Table 1 cause the most illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States. Two meat products, chicken and ground beef, account for the most outbreaks and are rated as the highest risk to consumers. The minimum growth temperatures for the two most common pathogens, salmonellae and pathogenic E. coli, are listed at 44.6° F. The minimum growth temperatures for the most common pathogens are listed in Table 2.

You can also view our innovative, easy-to-use data logger thermometers here – strong tools for food safety in the food manufacturing industry. Please contact us with further questions or for sales support.

The Origins of Food Safety Are Out of This World

The principles of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) originated in the NASA space program. NASA wanted food that wouldn’t crumble and affect control systems and would be safe for astronaut consumption. They already mandated the use of Critical Control Points (CCPs) in their design engineering process, but applying the same concepts to food production was new. This approach required food suppliers to start identifying “critical failure areas” and eliminate them from the system.  This began the conversation and the new voluntary global industry standard was ready to be rolled out to an audience beyond NASA in 1971. In contrast, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) legislation was passed by Congress and signed into law in January 2011. It mandates Hazard Analysis and Risk-based Preventive Controls (HARPC) as the food processing industry’s regulatory standard.

Preventing Food Contamination From “Farm-to-Fork”

The FSMA marks a dramatic change in the intent and emphasis of U.S. food regulations that had been in effect for the past 70 years. Prior Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations required that food manufacturing facilities react to the outbreak of foodborne pathogens. The FSMA shifts their regulatory focus to a more proactive stance on preventing food contamination from “farm-to-fork”. Signed into law in 2011, the FSMA has just finalized and formulated their regulation and began implementation.

When Does the Regulatory Shift Take Place?

The Preventive Controls for Human Food deadline is August 30, 2016. According to the Association of Food, Beverage and Consumer Products Companies, the effective dates for the general compliance period are demonstrated in the chart below.


Implementation periods for small and very small businesses extend implementation by one year and two years, respectively.

Advanced Energy's TEGAM designs, manufactures and sells digital thermometers for the food industry, among other industries where our measuring instrumentation find useful homes. Our datalogger thermometers feature wireless Bluetooth® connectivity for Cloud storage access, while our thermocouple thermometers feature temperature probes for easy temperature monitoring. Contact us here for more information or to engage with our sale team for product purchases, please.

 

By Dan Jackson, TEGAM Thermometry Product Manager

I’m just back from the IFT (International Food Technology) Show 2019 in New Orleans this June.

There were over 17,000 attendees present to see the latest innovations from global food industry suppliers, ranging from the most efficient mixers to plant-based proteins that replace animal-based proteins. The new technologies to produce food ingredients is amazing. There was also a lot of new technology about making usable products from what used to be considered waste. (Usable proteins from lobster shells for example.) The food industry is definitely driving technology currently! I did not see it at the exhibition this year, but I would not be surprised if they started 3D-printing food to order soon!

Among all the chemistry and flavorings that are involved in food manufacturing these days, it is amazing how many applications exist where temperature monitoring and maintenance play a critical role in the food and ingredient production and storage processes. You cannot prepare commercial food products today without precision temperature measurement. ‘Everybody’ knows that for most meats, the magic temperature is 165°F, not 164.5°F that a low-cost digital thermometer would register and read as 165°F! Advanced Energy's TEGAM has developed special algorithms that assure that the temperature display does not read 165°F until the temperature is actually 165.0°F. If you’re a food manufacturer dealing with frozen foods, we also have an algorithm that works in that frigid direction to assure that your product is at -4.0°F, not -3.5°F, when the display reads as -4°F.

Many companies are instituting on-line process monitoring – having their quality test readings go directly into their QMS system to document compliance without the opportunity for human error. The difficult part is to get the reading from the process floor to a computer. Pen & clipboard and later, data entry, are prone to errors.

TEGAM has developed our 930 Series Datalogging Thermometers with wireless Bluetooth communications to make such data logging and entry very efficient. There are multiple ways to get the data from the handheld meter into your data system. The units can store up to 1000 points internally (each one date-and-time stamped), the wireless communications can go through a cell phone to virtually limitless cloud storage, and all files are spread-sheet compatible. There’s also a TEGAM software development  kit for dataloggers that offers a CSV file to a laptop or the source code for full system integration. With all the digital data being collected, one of these paths should solve most individual or plant-wide needs.

In Today’s regulated world, data is often required to prove compliance and accuracies are often specified as tight as ±1°F. Plants need a method to verify and record the accuracies of their measuring instruments. I was talking to a commercial mushroom grower and learned that even small differences in soil temperature can make a big difference in yield. Morel Mushrooms prefer a temperature range of 50° to 60°F but fruit best when the soil temperature is a constant 53°F. If the soil temperature reaches 60°F or above, fruiting stops. This just shows how broad is the need for precision temperature measurement within the food industry!

Another important application in food manufacturing is the documenting of temperatures in flash-freeze processes and the long-term storage temperatures of frozen foods.

To verify the accuracy of a thermometry instrument, a company needs to either send each instrument out to a metrology lab for calibration (which can interfere with production timetables ) or have a temperature calibrator in your facility.

The generally accepted accuracy of a temperature calibrator is at least 4 time the accuracy of the instrument being calibrated. TEGAM digital thermometers are 0.04% accuracy – which means a calibrator must be 4 times that, 0.01% or better, to be used to calibrate the thermometers. The new TEGAM 940 series thermocouple temperature calibrators meet that requirement. We try to make it easy for our customers – you can equip your plant with our TEGAM digital thermometers, and have one calibrator on-hand and available to verify all the units in the plant.

If you are in the Food or Ingredients industries and need precision temperature measurement devices for your applications, please consider TEGAM – we understand what it takes to meet all the quality requirements necessary for your QA and food hygiene processes and have devised digital measuring devices for those very needs. Thanks for reading!