Keep your Minnesota kitchen compliant. We track the latest food recalls and safety alerts so you can pull bad products fast and protect your customers.

CFPMs and In-House Grown Herbs

CFPMs and In-House Grown Herbs

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Springtime is here, and with it the fresh aromas and flavors of the new season. Flowers are blooming, and fresh herbs become more readily available. That got us to thinking about CFPMs and In-House Grown Herbs, what’s to prevent them from adding some of that freshness to their menu by growing their own herb gardens in-house?

CFPMs and In-House Grown Herbs
Image credit: Max Pixel

CFPMs and In-House Grown Herbs Use

It should first be noted, that growing herbs at your facility should only really be done on a small scale. Mass production may be outside of the realm of certified food protection managers’ abilities, but growing live plants can help cut down on costs and help you ensure that your ingredients are fresh. Here’s a few things to think about if you’re considering growing your own herbs:

  • Keep herb boxes and gardens away from the production floor
  • Avoid soil additives such as fertilizer, manure and pesticides
  • Always wash picked herbs before using

We’re in no way suggesting you plant a garden in the middle of your kitchen, so an herb garden may not be for every facility. When considering an in-house herb garden, look for locations outside and away from the kitchen. Some restaurants make this a feature for their guests to see, either in front of the restaurant or guest pathways leading to the facility. This implants the idea of fresh ingredients before they’ve even viewed your menu. For some, a garden may not be possible, but smaller box style planters around the facility allow you to grow commonly used ingredients.

Certified food protection managers need to be very aware of contaminates and unnatural pathogens when using freshly grown herbs. For this reason, we’d recommend using pure soil rather than adding any fertilizer or compost. Many gardening supply stores have special mixes that would help grow savory herbs without additives.

Some jurisdictions may have different rules about growing herbs or other produce onsite, so if you need help with local rules, don’t hesitate to contact your local health inspector.

Would you consider growing any type of ingredients at your restaurant or other food production facility, or do you prefer bringing it in from your suppliers?

CFPMs Manage Questionable Product

How CFPMs Manage Questionable Product

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In your role as a certified food protection manager, have you ever had a staff member ask, “Does this smell ok to you?” or, “Do you know when this clam chowder was made?” and, “Can we still serve this?” This week, we’ll take a look at how CFPMs manage questionable product and to deal with situations that may increase the risk of sickening your customers.

CFPMs Manage Questionable Product
cooking, profession and people concept – male chef cook with clipboard doing inventory in restaurant kitchen

CFPMs Manage Questionable Product By Assessing Reasons for Spoiling or Low Quality Product

Situations where you or your staff is unsure of the quality, freshness or servability of product should be dealt with in a manner that protects your guests. If product doesn’t smell right, don’t serve it. If you are unsure about the date a product was made, or if it might no longer be good, don’t serve it. Taking a chance on sickening a guest because of questionable product is never worth the risk. So how do we deal with these situations and prevent them from happening?

If these instances are common in your facility, now is the time to take a look at how you deal with your inventory. There are a few questions that need to be asked:

  • Am I dating my product and inventory?
  • Am I making or ordering too much product?
  • Is my refrigerated storage arranged in an orderly manner?

Dating perishable product allows certified food protection managers and their staff know exactly when the ingredients arrived from a supplier or when finished product was made. Taking the time to date your product paints a bigger picture of how long your product sits in storage. If you’re finding that your product is being stored for extended periods of time, consider lowering par levels when you place an order or making smaller batches of your product.

Successful CFPMs manage questionable product with organization. If you’re refrigerator is a mess, then product can get lost, soak up flavors of food that is cooling nearby or risk cross contamination. Disorderly cold storage is a bacterial dream world and a certified food protection manager’s nightmare.

If you do date your product, monitor par levels and have an orderly walk-in refrigerator but are still running into scenarios where freshness comes into question, the certified food protection manager should set up a system to monitor the temperature of your refrigeration units to ensure that food is being kept cold.

Do you have a system to keep your product the freshest it can be?

food safety inspection process

Improving the International Food Safety Inspection Process

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In a complex global supply chain, the task of keeping unsafe product from reaching customers and food producers in the United States is a daunting and seemingly impossible task. The FDA has recently released their new food safety inspection process strategy for keeping unsafe product from reaching our shores.

food safety inspection process
Image credit: FDA photo by Michael J. Ermarth

Global Strategy To Improve Food Safety Inspection Process For Imported Product

With a new strategy in mind, the FDA has outlined four goals for the future of foreign food inspection:

  • Coordinating with foreign food safety inspectors
  • Detecting and refusing tainted goods before entry into the U.S.
  • Develop targeted sampling and testing of high-risk product
  • Develop and improve a global inventory of farms and food producers

Coordinating with other countries comparable food safety inspection process will provide an extra layer of protection before food leaves the country or origin. These local inspectors will be able to do a more thorough inspection, and their knowledge of food producers goes a long way to preventing tainted product from leaving their country in the first place. The FDA currently works with food safety inspectors in Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Negotiations are underway with officials in the European Union.

The FDA’s plan to upgrade the screening process upon entry will do a better job of identifying product that could be contaminated. This process will involve new foreign supplier verification, accredited third party audits and several other updated and more efficient systems. Along with this process will be the collection of data to target suppliers of high-risk products such as soft cheeses and seafood.

The final step in the updated food safety inspection process will involve an inventory or database of overseas producers that ship their product to the United States. This will identify producers who have previously shipped tainted product, isolate high-risk farming regions and provide food safety inspectors with more information than they’ve had in the past.

We like to see our national food safety inspection process evaluated and updated to provide safer product. Do you feel this new FDA strategy will keep product imported from foreign countries safer?

Findings of FDA Report on Romaine Lettuce Recalls

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Recent major recalls of romaine lettuce have increased the concern certified food protection managers have for putting romaine on their menus and calls into question the future of this crispy green lettuce as a staple in the industry. In mid-February, the FDA report on romaine lettuce concluded its research into the latest recall of E.coli contaminated lettuce and was able to not only trace the source of the contaminated romaine, but also the likely method of contamination.

FDA Report On Romaine Lettuce
Image credit : Wikimedia Commons

FDA Report on Romaine Lettuce Linked to E.coli Contamination

The FDA has traced the origin of contaminated lettuce to a farm in Santa Barbara County, CA. More specifically, the FDA report on romaine lettuce has discovered an unsanitized water reservoir with traces of the same strain of E.coli that was used by several ranches in the community. The water from this reservoir is the mostly likely cause of contamination causing food-borne illness across the nation. E.coli can into contact with lettuce during rinsing after harvest or during harvest by coming into contacted with harvesting equipment that had been washed with contaminated water.

Now that we have this information from the FDA report on romaine lettuce, it brings up two questions:

  1. Why such a massive recall if the outbreak can be traced back to one specific growing area?
  2. How can certified food protection managers use this information to keep their product safe?

The answer to the first one is simple; there is no efficient method to trace the source of contaminated produce. There are numerous farms and ranches that produce romaine lettuce, and with so many major producers and buyers, the process of tracing back a single head, case or major supply can often take time. Restaurant suppliers purchase their lettuce from numerous sources, so the romaine you receive on a Tuesday can come from one part of California while Friday’s shipment originates in another or even New Mexico. The CDC and FDA simply have to err on the side of caution when it comes to issuing warnings and recalls for any major product.

Finally, and unfortunately, when it comes to E.coli and lettuce, the only recourse food safety managers have is to throw out recalled product and alter their menus in the event of an outbreak. Rinsing lettuce will not one-hundred percent remove E.coli from any produce product.

With such a large amount of lettuce suppliers, do you think any tracking system of contaminated product is possible, or will major nationwide recalls become the norm?