Detect and Protect: Food Quality Control

Large-scale, industrialised food processing is an integral part of the global supply chain; it allows food and beverages to be produced at a level that can satisfy global consumption and the customer’s demand for choice.

But as processing plants continue their slide away from the small-scale local operations of yesteryear and begin to look more and more like factories from any industry, there are significant downsides.

The most important of these is the potential for dangerous pathogens to slip through the net as increasing quantities make it more difficult to ensure the most rigorous hygiene standards are applied to each and every item.

The need for improvement in quality control practices is universally recognised, especially in the meat, seafood and dairy sectors, where the potential for harmful bacteria is the strongest.

Shocking statistics and reports of dramatic food recalls are now a regular part of the food industry’s media coverage.

In February this year, for example, a report by Canadian consumer advocacy magazine Marketplace revealed that around 67% of chicken sold from the country’s supermarkets contained harmful bacteria like salmonella and E.coli, with all the samples resistant to at least one antibiotic, a reported side-effect of poultry producers giving their chickens too many antibiotics during the rearing stage.

The dangers of E.coli were made starkly apparent in May, when an outbreak in Germany killed more than 40 people and visitors took the infection home with them, spreading the crisis across Europe and to the US and Canada. The frequency of these kinds of events highlights the need for industry, regulators and research bodies to contribute to a cleaner, safer future for food production.

Here we look at the recent efforts made within and outside the industry to improve standards and minimise public exposure to bacteria.

Faster pathogen detection technologies

A number of companies around the world are working on improving the technology behind detecting pathogens and improving food safety. Delaware-based biotech company SDIX has been a long-standing developer of pathogen detection systems; the company’s RapidChek products have been expanded to flag up E.coli O157, Listeria, salmonella and salmonella enteritidis.

The system to detect the latter was one of the first commercial sero-specific assays to be awarded test method equivalent from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and approved by the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists (AOAC) for its accuracy and ability to produce validated results for environmental and pooled egg samples within 40-48 hours, significantly faster than many methods that often take a week.

At this year’s meeting of the International Association of Food Protection (IAFP) in Milwaukee, US, between 31 July and 3 August, SDIX unveiled a pair of new products that promise to speed up pathogen detection even further.

The new RapidChek F.A.S.T (fast accurate sensitive technology) test system can provide results on the presence of Listeria on environmental surfaces in less than 24 hours. The system also promises to be simple to use, and with the simultaneous release of the RapidScan data management system the results can be automatically uploaded to a laboratory information management system (LIMS) to minimise the chance for human error.

SDIX food safety market manager Tim Lawruk emphasised that speedily checking food for bacteria can have financial as well as safety benefits. “The advantages of releasing products even 2-4 hours faster include lower storage requirements and extended product shelf-life, both of which provide important economic benefits,” he said.

“The RapidChek Listeria F.A.S.T. system will be a valuable tool as all federally and state inspected meat and poultry plants in the United States look to comply with the USDA-FSIS [US Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service] mandated ‘test and hold’ programme for products being tested for pathogens.”

The role of academia

Meanwhile, in Wales, developments at the University of Aberystwyth are emphasising the role that academic specialists have to play in the development of new technologies.

The university’s Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences (IBERS) is a running the improved food safety initiative – a collaborative industrial research project, which was launched to develop a new additive that could make a serious impact on poultry safety.

Scientists at the university are working on a new natural additive that can be added to poultry feed to highlight any faecal contamination of poultry carcasses, a relatively common problem that can lead to outbreaks of food poisoning. The additive is water-soluble and chlorophyll-based, and would be fed to chickens and other poultry in the final days before slaughter.

According to IBERS, this causes any faecal contamination to give off an ultraviolet fluorescence that can be revealed by fluorescent screening.

As well as the potential of this technology, the IBERS poultry project highlights the results that can be achieved through collaboration between academia, government and the private sector.

The improved food safety initiative is made possible by funding from the Welsh Government’s Academic Expertise for Business initiative, as well as the support of private industry, from national supermarket chain Waitrose to local meat processor Randall Parker Foods. As chief scientific advisor for Wales Professor John Harries put it, “[IBERS’ project] clearly illustrates the value of collaborative industrial research between business and academia, aimed at turning good ideas into commercial propositions, bringing new products and processes onto the market.” The project has already received significant interest from the US and South America, as well as requests to take up licensing of the technology from India and China.

The role of regulators

While the burden of developing innovative new quality control technologies falls to academics and the private sector, regulators must set the wider agenda, creating a framework that makes hygiene standards and quality assurance a compulsory and well-enforced process.

In many ways, this is a matter of money. State regulatory bodies require a generous slice of budget allocations to ensure inspections are carried out regularly, new legislative proposals can be suggested and violations are properly dealt with.

In the US, the FDA this year requested funding of $4.3bn from President Obama’s 2012 budget. This is an increase of around a third from the organisation’s 2010 budget, $324m of which would be spent on overhauling food safety and nutrition programmes to enforce the new food safety modernization act (FSMA).

This shifts the focus of regulators from contamination response (through product recalls) to preventing contamination in the first place.

An example of this shift in US food safety policy is the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) proposal to make mandatory its test-and-hold policy, which requires producers of beef, pork and poultry to hold their products back from distribution while they are being checked for contamination by the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

The aim is to contain the spread of potentially harmful foodstuffs before they become accessible to consumers, thereby preventing costly and time-consuming recalls. The FSIS itself estimates that 44 class I recalls in the US between 2007 and 2009 could have been avoided if this compulsory requirement had been in place.

One would be forgiven for assuming the industry would turn its back on a proposal that would place extra checks on their produce before going to market, but according to USDA secretary Tom Vilsack, that simply hasn’t happened. “The beauty of this proposal is that the industry has embraced it,” he said.

The majority of large US meat processing companies already comply with their own test-and-hold policies voluntarily, so the proposal is mostly targeting smaller operations and those that need to catch up with modern regulations. Both the American Meat Institute (AMI) and the North American Meat Processors Association (NAMP) have come out in support of the new proposal. “We believe that this policy will prevent needless recalls, further ensure food safety and maintain consumer confidence,” AMI president J Patrick Boyle said.

In Hong Kong, government regulators implemented a new Food Safety Ordinance on 1 August this year, requiring food importers and distributors to register with the Director of Food and Environmental Hygiene (DFEH) as well as keep records on the movements of food, making it easier for regulators to keep track of the supply chain and take action more quickly if an incident occurs.

Food safety seems best tackled with a multilateral approach, with private companies and research organisations working with government bodies to develop new technologies while regulators work on new ways to build accountability, traceability and constant monitoring into the supply chain. As has been seen in several of the examples cited in this article, the best quality control results are often achieved when all interested parties come together.