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.

Evaluating Food Safety

One of the suggestions I made in the last blog was to assess the food safety culture in your organization by observing the food handling techniques of workers. Let’s explore that some more. You can do an overall assessment or you can hone in on specific areas of the operation, such as production or cleaning practices. Remember, when the environmental health inspector visits your operation, he/she just gets a snapshot of what is going on in your operation on that particular day at that specific time. You are there nearly every day, so you have a much better understanding on what really happens in your operation.

September is Food Safety Education Month: The Culture of Food Safety

Developing a culture of food safety is important for any foodservice operation. You may be wondering--just what is a culture of food safety? Let’s start talking about it by first defining what is meant by culture. When you look culture up in the dictionary, you will see terms such as shared knowledge, beliefs, values, attitudes, and meanings; a way of life; patterns of behavior; learned behavior of a group of people; and transmitted from generation to generation. I think these descriptors provide good insight into the meaning of a culture of food safety. You can also think about where you grew up, and a vision of culture comes. For example, I grew up in rural Oklahoma, graduating in the 1970’s with a class of 24 students. My culture instilled in me an appreciation for rural life, hard work, and independence. As I grow older, I realize I haven’t changed very much from my early years, even though I have completed a PhD, lived a lot of places, and traveled throughout the world!

Produce Safety: Special Considerations

In our last blog, I talked about general produce safety. Today, I want to talk about some special products—melons, tomatoes, leafy greens, and sprouts. These are all foods that have a history of bacterial contamination leading to foodborne illness. I also want to discuss salad bars because they have some special risks.