All Posts Tagged: Food Safety

The gloves are off!

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Richard Mallett

What an interesting article in the European Cleaning Journal that reports on a study about poor hand hygiene within healthcare workers who wear gloves!

This hazard is something also recognised within the food industry of course. We have seen with our own eyes the lack of hand washing and significant potential for cross contamination caused by catering workers wearing gloves and then failing to exercise proper control. The simple rules are:-

  1. Consider the glove really just as a “second skin” – you will pick up the same bacteria from raw foods and dirty surfaces. You do not become invincible or invisible to microbes!
  2. Change gloves frequently – especially after touching dirty areas or raw food.
  3. Change damaged gloves.
  4. Wash the hands when changing gloves – the build up of perspiration and warmth perpetuates the increase in bacterial population on the hands.
  5. Make sure the gloves are made of food safe material – look for instance for the little glass and fork symbol on the packaging which will tell you this. Look for some sort of accreditation to food safety such as the globally trusted HACCP International certification.
  6. Blue gloves are better! If they do fragment then the control of last resort is that the catering worker should be able to identify fragments of broken glove contaminating food

Proper glove control as well as hand hygiene is just one of the things that are assessed during MQM Consulting Food Hygiene Audits.

No confirmed cause of Clostridium botulinum outbreak

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Richard Mallett

Food Quality News reports that a spokesperson from the Food Standards Agency has said that no confirmed cause of the family outbreak from the Lloyd Grossman Korma sauce, produced by Premier Foods, has yet been found. Investigations are ongoing but it seems to us that this one may slip away. The fact that only one jar was implicated is something of a hindrance to a typical outbreak investigation that looks for common links that may point towards a single mistake or contamination point. It seems perhaps unlikely that it was an overall process error, or further jars would most likely have become contaminated or survival of the organism (if inherited within raw materials) permitted. So it may not necessarily be a HACCP related issue? We wait to see if any more information is released by the FSA.

Update on Food Hygiene Ratings Scheme

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Richard Mallett

The Food Standards Agency has released updates on how our local authorities are progressing with the launch of the Food Hygiene Ratings Scheme. It looks like good progress so far with 180 local authorities publishing over 140,000 ratings from 0 (urgent improvement required) to 5 (very good standards of food hygiene). Now it just needs rolling out properly to the general public, to encourage them to read the ratings, base at least part of their eating out decision on it, and thus to perpetuate the food safety message.

A point for debate – product recall

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Richard Mallett

I wonder whether we are just possibly over-reacting to risk in this case?

The recall of Lloyd Grossman sauce has, according to the latest from the FSA, affected only one jar of the entire batch.

The toxin that causes the illness is very easily destroyed by normal cooking and again that can be verified by the a linked article issued by the FSA. Now if we had a water supply problem, which was a microbiological issue, a boil order would most likely be issued. So should we simply issue a warning that the consumer should thoroughly heat the sauce, as they should anyway?!

I’m interested to hear comment.

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