Contamination of Food: Let’s Get Physical

Earlier this month, we began a discussion about contamination of food. Our first blog focused on chemical contamination, but in this blog, I’d like to look at physical contamination of food.

Any item which does not belong in the food product can be considered a physical contaminate, a hair, a piece of plastic or metal, or even a fake fingernail. While some physical contaminants, such as a piece of hair in your food may only be disgusting, other physical contaminants can cause serious injury to the consumer, including lacerations to the mouth and intestines, broken teeth, or can pose a serious choking hazard

When food arrives at your foodservice facility and throughout production, it is vital that you have strong controls in place to maintain the integrity of the food, limiting chances for inadvertent contamination of physical objects. 

Physical hazards were not something I generally had to deal with when I was in operations, I imagine the same can be said for many of you. I do recall one incident when we had a chicken salad sandwich returned by a customer, who found a red acrylic fingernail in their chicken salad.  When we surveyed the staff that day, we found that the salad, which was a prepackaged product, was opened that morning and none of our staff had on fake fingernails. Meaning the product had to come from the manufacturer.  Luckily, the acrylic fingernail only caused disgust and no serious injuries.

While food companies work exceedingly hard to keep their products free from physical contaminants, it does occasionally occur.  In 2021 and through January of 2021, 14 food recalls were issued in the United States due to foreign objects in food, including metal, plastic, glass, and small stones.

When food arrives at your foodservice facility and throughout production, it is vital that you have strong controls in place to maintain the integrity of the food, limiting chances for inadvertent contamination of physical objects.  Here are four tips to help you in achieving this goal:

  • Establish and monitor dress control policies, such as requiring employees to remove jewelry and wearing a hair restraint while in food production.
  • Practice preventative maintenance on production equipment and repair or replace damaged equipment and parts immediately.
  • Encourage employees to report any issues with equipment to supervisors and be sure to follow-through with corrective action. Not doing such will just cause employees to ask why they are reporting things when nothing ever gets fixed.
  • Work with a reputable pest control company who works with you and your employees in establishing a solid and effective pest control program.

Underpinning all of these is to be sure you create and sustain a culture of food safety throughout your organization. Managers and all staff should know that nothing is so important that it cannot be done with food safety in mind.  Check out our previous blog on developing this culture to make sure you operation is on the right path. Risk Nothing.

Exclusion and Restrictions: Understanding Employee Health and the Food Code

I received a call earlier in the month from a foodservice operator who suspected that one of their employees may have fallen ill and wondered if they had to send the employee home for the day.  Once I started to ask a few more questions, it became obvious that the operator wasn’t really in-tune with the food code requirements on restrictions or exclusions for employees who may not be feeling well.  Given that most operations are dealing with staff shortages currently and the fact that we are about to head into the fall and winter – when we tend to see an increase in upper respiratory and other illnesses, such as the flu - it seemed like a very timely and important topic for the blog this month.

Cross Contamination and the Surfaces that go Unnoticed

In October, I ran across a new research study published in the Journal of Food Protection in early-September.  The article explored cross contamination in consumer kitchens during meal preparation. One of the authors was a previous SafeBites presenter, Dr. Ellen Shumaker, at North Carolina State University.  Although the setting was consumer kitchens and not the commercial kitchen many of you deal with daily, the findings were very applicable to what we often see in the foodservice setting.

Emergency Preparedness: The Not-so Calm After the Storm

If you and your foodservice operation have been hit by an emergency or other disaster, what comes next and how do you move forward? Much of the answer to this is predicated on the actual disaster that you are dealing with – a flood is certainly a much different than a fire, but some of the food safety considerations remain the same if your business has been left intact and has not been damaged by the disaster.

Emergency Preparedness and Responding to a Disaster with Food Safety in Mind

As I write the first blog this month, the realities of the devastation in Florida are coming to light as we also deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona, which impacted Puerto Rico late in September. Recent news has been focused on the recovery efforts for all who have been impacted. Thus, I thought it would be fitting this month to discuss emergency disaster planning resources in our first blog and delve into recovering from a disaster in our second blog later this month.