Food safety conference
Barbara Hirst
Consultant for food safety and quality at Reading Scientific Services, Barbara Hirst, spoke to delegates about the dangers of allergenic ingredients in the food manufacturing environment and ways to manage such hazards.
Hirst: “Two people, in the UK, every month die as a result of a food allergen. So when we are talking about managing this, can we eliminate the risk from food factories?
Well, no, clearly not, you’re trying to make food, it’s a messy job. But, what’s an acceptable level [of risk to have].
“We know if you process allergenic ingredients – in other words if you remove some of the hazards – you reduce the amount of protein which is the thing that people have a reaction to. You inherently will reduce its allergenic potential.
“Not everybody who is allergic to eggs reacts in the same way, so this makes things quite difficult. That person’s threshold will change every day. This is really hard now – how are you as food manufacturers meant to do this stuff when you’ve got all these variables?
“You have to think about how the allergen is going to move about. Is it going to be in the air, on people or equipment? Are you selling product to vulnerable groups? Are you making a free-from declaration?
“You need to characterise that risk, think about the hazard and then validate it.”
Hirst spoke about the three areas where food businesses are slipping up when handling allergenic ingredients in their factories.
“[The first] is label management, putting the wrong product in the wrong packet is the most dangerous thing you can do for an allergic consumer because they are not expecting it to be there and it is ingredient-level contamination that kills them.
“Traceability: we are quite good when products come into our warehouse we know what they are. But, as soon as you take them out of their packaging it is very easy to lose things and not know what you are dealing with.
“You need to think about capability and training.
“What kind of level of training should you give so that [your employees] can do their job properly? You don’t want them sitting in a classroom for six hours to then walk out. They need to know what it means for their job so they have to do it right every single time – so keep it simple.”