| Imagine a doctor not washing his hands in between baby deliveries. Unbelievable but true, this was a widespread practice up until last century when infections, followed by death of newborns, was an all-too common occurrence in hospitals across the United States. It took an observant nurse to put two and two together after watching many physicians go from delivery room to delivery room, mother to mother, without washing their hands. Once hand washing in between deliveries was made mandatory, the incidence of infection and death in newborns plummeted.
Why wasn’t this simple and common sense solution instituted earlier? Was it ignorance, negligence, laziness, or a combination thereof that kept doctors from washing up? Whatever the root cause of this ridiculous oversight, it remains a fact of history. Common sense was finally employed, and babies’ lives saved. The same common sense is at play in the development of the FDA’s Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) policy, which was developed to ensure the safe production of commercial food products. Like the observant nurse who played watchdog to doctors’ poor hygiene practices and became the catalyst for improved hospital procedures set in place and remaining until today, HACCP policy results in a proactive strategy where hazards are identified, assessed, and then control measures developed to prevent, reduce, and eliminate potential hazards. In this article, we’ll begin to explore how engineers design food processing equipment and production lines in accordance with the seven HACCP principles. You will note that here, once again, the execution of common sense can solve many problems. Principle 1: Conduct a hazard analysis. – Those involved in designing food processing equipment and production lines must proactively analyze designs to identify potential food safety hazards. If the hazard analysis reveals contaminants are likely to find their way into food products, then preventive measures are put in place in the form of design revisions. For example, suppose a food processing machine is designed and hazard analysis reveals that food can accumulate in areas where cleaning is difficult or impossible. This accumulation will rot with time, and the bacteria-laden glop can fall onto uncontaminated food passing through production lines. As another example, a piece of metal tooling may have been designed with the intent to form food products into a certain shape, but hazard analysis reveals that the tooling is too fragile and cannot withstand the repeated forces imposed on it by the mass production process. There is a strong likelihood that small metal parts can break off and enter the food on the line. Next time we’ll move on to HACCP Principle 2 and see how design engineers control problems identified during the hazard analysis performed pursuant to Principle 1. ____________________________________________
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Posts Tagged ‘hazard analysis critical control point’
Food Manufacturing Challenges – HACCP Design Principle No. 1
Sunday, October 16th, 2011
Food Manufacturing Challenges – Avoiding Contamination
Sunday, October 9th, 2011| Perhaps you’ve heard of the non-reciprocal wine and sewage principle. I’m not sure where it originated, but it states that if you add a cup of wine to a barrel of sewage, you still get a barrel of sewage. No brainer, right? Well, consider the flip side. If you add a cup of sewage to a barrel of wine, you also get nothing more than a barrel of sewage. In other words, a small amount of contamination goes a long way.
The premise of this principle also applies within the food manufacturing industry. If you were to add uncontaminated food to garbage, you would just get more garbage, and if you add garbage to food… well, you get it. The term garbage can encompass an endless variety of contaminants, such as broken glass, metal shavings, nuts, bolts, plastic fibers, grease, broken machine parts, errant human body parts, and on and on. Although the FDA does allow for certain levels of natural contaminants, like insect parts and rodent hairs, consumers are never pleased when undesirable elements enter their food supply. It could even be dangerous. When design engineers create food processing machinery and production lines, they must be on the lookout for potential risks of contamination hazards. They must also provide a quick means of mitigation, before contaminants can enter into commercial production. A systematic approach provides the best means of addressing these needs, allowing for a pre-emptive method to ensure food safety. Checklists and procedural policy set in place for these reasons will enable design engineers to identify, assess, and control risks before they turn into hazards. This is where Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) planning comes in. To address these needs, the FDA has set up the HACCP (pronounced, “hass-up”) system, defined as “…a management system in which food safety is addressed through the analysis and control of biological, chemical, and physical hazards from raw material production, procurement and handling, to manufacturing, distribution and consumption of the finished product.” HACCP is the outgrowth of FDA current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP), which are set out in the Code of Federal Regulations pertaining to commercial food processors and manufacturers, Title 21, Part 110, entitled, “current Good Manufacturing Practice in Manufacturing, Packing or Holding Human Food.” Every commercial food processor, regardless of size, must implement a cGMP/HACCP quality assurance program to comply with these regulations. HACCP is a proactive strategy where hazards are identified, assessed, and then control measures developed to prevent, reduce, or eliminate potential hazards. A key element of HACCP involves prevention of food contamination during all phases of manufacturing, and way before the finished food product undergoes quality inspection. This strategy extends into the food manufacturing equipment and production line design process as well. Next time we’ll continue our look at HACCP and how its seven principles are used by design engineers to prevent food product contamination.
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