How proactive are you about food safety?
Does your company currently have food safety protocols in place based on HACCP, or other certifiable food safety standards?
With all of the highly publicized incidents that have occurred recently in various arms of the agriculture and food industries, food processors and fresh packers can ill afford to be passive when it comes to their food safety protocols.
Companies that take a proactive stance on food safety consider that meeting the USDA and FDA standards for food safety should only be the first step in their food safety protocols. Many of the large retail food chains for instance are setting their own food safety guidelines and standards to ensure that their suppliers not only meet governmental standards, but that they also remain motivated to look for and implement other preventative food safety steps, checks and measures.
With the rise of lot coding and tracking software, a growing number of retailers are further putting pressure on suppliers by asking them to track products, right down to the very fields they were grown in. Some even insist that their suppliers keep detailed logs and records of what they apply to the product right up to the harvest date. Standards like this only put further pressure on the supply chain to make sure that the product goes through all of the necessary check points on its way to the consumer. This also provides the retailer with the ability to track back to the source of a food safety issue if one ever develops. Needless to say, suppliers of fruit and vegetables have never been more scrutinized in how they grow, harvest, pack and ship their produce.
Fortunately, having a proactive food safety program has also never been more attainable. There are countless resources for training and certifying your staff to develop, implement and regulate proactive food safety programs. Furthermore, other advances in preventative food safety have come to the foreground in recent years that weren’t available even a decade ago.
Fruittek is proud to represent some of these exciting advances, including our aggressive fruit and vegetable treatments that can be applied in the field, on the production line or even in storage after your product is packed. Our FogTunnel technology for one, is one preventative food safety step that ensures every fruit or vegetable that crosses your production line will be treated with an aggressive, non-toxic, oxidizing bactericide/fungicide to control pathogens, mold and disease. The chemistry we use in our FogTunnel can also be used to sanitize all of the hard surfaces in your production facility (and can be injected into your existing sanitation equipment or applied with our ES100 fogging system).
Please take the time to check out our exciting advances in preventative food safety and don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have.
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