Mississauga – As unlikely as it seems, food safety
professionals look to a sanitation executive at J.M. Schneider Inc. and Maple
Leaf Foods Inc. for advice on keeping their plants, equipment and products
safe.
Schneiders was involved in the biggest food recall in
Canadian history when its lunchmate products were identified as responsible for
hundreds of sickened school children in the spring of 1998.
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| Maple Leaf's sanitation chief, Larry Mendes |
Eventually 65 people ended up in hospital with severe
symptoms and more than 800 cases were confirmed by public health units, giving
rise to estimates that upwards of 8,000 Canadians probably suffered some degree
of food poisoning.
It was after Maple Leaf Foods bought Schneiders and Larry
Mendes moved there to eventually become sanitation programs manager, that Maple
Leaf’s Barton Road plant became embroiled in an even bigger food-poisoning
scandal that resulted in at least 20 deaths and a $27-million class-action
lawsuit settlement.
Despite that – or perhaps because of what he learned through
those and other experiences- Mendes has won a number of food-safety and
sanitation awards, including from the Ontario Food Protection Association where
he was a feature speaker at its Spring Technical Conference at the Mississauga
Convention Centre recently.
The Barton Road listeria source was eventually traced to the
insides of a meat-slicing machine. The company and the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency have responded with new protocols for sanitizing those and similar
machines.
Mendes stressed careful cleaning of equipment in his
presentation, including pictures to show how hollow rollers on conveyors need
to be opened, cleaned and sterilized, how every nook and cranny needs to be
cleaned and sanitized and how electronic and electric panels needs to be opened
for cleaning. At the 28 Maple Leaf plants, sanitation staff now need to put a
sticker inside those control panels to indicate when it was cleaned and
sanitized and who did it.
Maple Leaf staff also meet weekly now to assess food safety,
and the teams include maintenance staff and production staff, not just the
sanitation crew.
Mendes stressed the importance of having the chief executive
officer and all of the management ranks putting high priority of food safety.
In the United States, a number of companies have ended in
bankruptcy when their products have been found responsible for outbreaks of
food poisoning, That hasn’t happened in Canada where Schneiders and Maple Leaf
remain leading brands.
Mendes said sanitation is “like a hide and seek game, except
you can’t see micro-organisms.”
Food processors therefore collect and test swabs to detect
harmful bacteria.
Mendes said Maple Leaf tests 230,000 swabs a year, 60,000 of
them aerobic plate counts and 60,000 total plate loop counts.
He said “the beauty” of plate loop counts is that the
company doesn’t need to report the results to the Canadian Food Inspection
Agency. It is required to report any positive test results for listeria and
other harmful bacteria, such as E. coli 0157:H7 and Salmonella typherium type
two.
Mendes said high total plate loop counts have a high
correlation with harmful bacteria, so a high-count result prompts the company
to do further testing to determine whether there are harmful bacteria in the
products or the plant.
He said one new approach to sanitation that is proving
highly effective is “heat intervention” which involves high-humidity heating to
at least 160 degrees Fahrenheit (70 C) for at least 30 minutes or dry heating
that hot for at least four hours.
“I’ve never seen equipment that can be sanitized short of
heat intervention,” Mendes said, showing pictures of equipment that has been
enclosed in bags for the fogging and heat treatment.
He also said “heat interventions is something fairly new in
our industry.”
But he also said effective sanitation involves “multiple
interventions” such as washing, sanitizing chemicals, thorough staff training
and frequent re-training and swabbing in out-of-the-way places such as nooks
and crannies, inside electrical and electronic control panels, inside hollow
rollers, underneath conveyor belts and in metal equipment channels.
Maple Leaf conducts quarterly audits which include the plant
manager.
Maple Leaf has an eight-steps cleaning program now, up from
three when Mendes started 32 years ago at Schneiders, and he said it’s a
mistake to skip the final step, which is inspection, figuring that the
next-shift crew will be doing a quality check and swabs before it starts
processing.
“Micro (-organism) control is a battle that food processors
can’t afford to lose,” was Mendes’ concluding comment.
