Hygiene Monitoring
Identifying Sources and Root Causes of Food Hazards - Part 1
The control of food hazards is a significant concern for food manufactures. Two significant sources of these hazards are allergens and pathogens. Food manufacturers can address these potential threats to product quality by implementing essential processes in their facilities: raw material and finished product testing, and cleaning verification throughout the facilities used to store raw materials, manufacture products, and package final products for supply to customers.
Part 1 of this article will focus on cleaning verification (below) while Part 2 will focus on raw material and finished product testing.
When it comes to cleaning verification, a cost-effective solution that has become the industry standard is ATP monitoring. ATP is a biological indicator that food, bacteria, or other organisms are present and that the cleaning process was not able to remove this contamination.
An excellent option for testing any surface in your facility is the EnSURE™ Touch System. The monitoring system can determine the presence of ATP using a variety of sampling devices. UltraSnap™ and SuperSnap™ are self-contained, swab-based devices, designed to collect residue from any surface to detect ATP.
Both have unprecedented accuracy and reliability. SuperSnap is sensitive enough to use with harsh cleaning processes or for rapid validation of allergen removal. When paired with Hygiena's data analysis software, SureTrend™, EnSURE Touch results can be stored for analysis, tracking trouble areas, and trending test results across multiple facilities.
