Food Safety for the 21st Century

Managing HACCP and Food Safety Throughout the Global Supply Chain

Carol A. Wallace, William H. Sperber, Sara E. Mortimore

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119053576
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Subtopic: Lebensmittelwissenschaft

Revised to reflect the most recent developments in food safety, the second edition of Food Safety for the 21st Century offers practitioners an authoritative text that contains the essentials of food safety management in the global supply chain. The authors — noted experts in the field — reveal how to design, implement and maintain a stellar food safety programme. The book contains industry best-practices that can help businesses to improve their systems and accelerate the application of world-class food safety systems. The authors outline the key food safety considerations for individuals, businesses and organisations involved in today's complex global food supply chains.

The text contains the information needed to recognise food safety hazards, design safe products and processes and identify and manage effectively the necessary control mechanisms within the food business. The authors also include a detailed discussion of current issues and key challenges in the global food supply chain. This important guide:

•Offers a thorough review of the various aspects of food safety and considers how to put in place an excellent food safety system
•Contains the information on HACCP appropriate for all practitioners in the world-wide food supply chain
•Assists new and existing business to meet their food safety goals and responsibilities
•Includes illustrative examples of current thinking and challenges to food safety management and recommendations for making improvements to systems and practices

Written for food safety managers, researchers and regulators worldwide, this revised guide offers a comprehensive text and an excellent reference for developing, implementing and maintaining world-class food safety programmes and shows how to protect and defend the food supply chain from threats.

Part I
Food Safety Challenges in the 21st Century

1
Origin and Evolution of the Modern System of Food Safety Management: HACCP and Prerequisite Programmes

1.1 Historical Perspectives

Food safety management practices have been evolving continually in the food industries of developed nations, particularly since the end of World War II (WWII) in 1945. Nevertheless, despite more than 70 years of progress in the assurance of food safety, failures sometimes occur. The intent of this introduction is to summarise the principal events in the origin and evolution of modern food safety practices so that readers can better understand how to improve practices and to provide even greater food safety assurance in the future.

The beginning of WWII coincided with the end of the Great Depression that had hindered economic progress throughout the entire world during the decade of the 1930s. Western nations mobilised their economic resources during the early 1940s to manufacture the weapons of war. Upon the war's end, the energised economic and manufacturing bases were converted to the building of infrastructure and the production of consumer goods rather than war materials. Several of the principal innovations that impacted food safety were the development and widespread use of mechanical refrigeration and the construction of national transportation systems, such as the interstate highway system in the United States.

Before the widespread use of mechanical refrigeration, many perishable foodstuffs were stored in iceboxes that required frequent replenishment of the ice supply. Iceboxes could not provide uniform or steady cold temperatures. As a result, perishable foods often became unfit for consumption; consumers were forced to shop frequently for perishable goods. Mechanical refrigeration units were able to provide relatively uniform and steady cold temperatures, about 4° to 7° C, thereby substantially reducing the amount of food spoilage and potential food safety incidents. The application of mechanical refrigeration was quickly extended to most homes and commercial establishments and to road and rail vehicles for the transportation of refrigerated or frozen foods and food ingredients.

The ability to use refrigerated transportation was greatly facilitated by the construction of modern rail and highway systems. Eventually, the production of refrigerated ocean liners and aeroplanes permitted the shipment of perishable foodstuffs across the oceans. These developments mean that the system of local food production and consumption that was widely used several generations ago has now been largely replaced by a massive global food supply chain in which foods and food ingredients are shipped amongst most nations of the world.

Mechanical refrigeration and lengthened supply chains have enabled the concentration of food production operations into relatively few large facilities that can ship food products to very large geographical areas. This phenomenon has occasionally been responsible for large foodborne illness outbreaks that would have been less likely when food production occurred in multiple smaller facilities, each of which supplied smaller geographical areas. However, it has also given us the opportunity to improve standards in hygiene and safety through specially designed modern food facilities.

A trend towards more convenient foods accompanied these developments. In products such as dried cake mixes, for example, dried eggs and dried milk were added at the point of manufacture so that the consumer would not need to use shell eggs or fresh milk during the preparation of the cake batter. The use of dried ingredients in the place of fresh raw materials was quickly applied to the production of many manufactured foods. This practice brought with it an unanticipated problem – an increase both in the incidence of Salmonella contamination and in the number of outbreaks and cases of human salmonellosis.

The reasons for these increases proved to be analogous to the reasons for larger outbreaks of foodborne illnesses being associated with large, centralised food production facilities. In home kitchens, the use of Salmonella‐contaminated fresh milk or shell eggs in family‐sized food portions could, at most, be responsible for a few cases of salmonellosis. However, when Salmonella‐contaminated dried eggs or dried milk were used in food manufacturing facilities in the production of massive quantities of food, many cases of salmonellosis could result.

The increased levels of pathogen contaminated foods and foodborne illnesses caused great concern in the rapidly evolving and growing global food industry of the 1950s and 1960s. Government regulators and consumers demanded safer foods. These demands were followed by intensified efforts to manage food production in order to reduce the food safety risks. Early efforts to assure food safety attempted to use quality control procedures that had been implemented with the modernisation of the food industry after WWII.

Manufacturers of many types of products, including foods and many household appliances, used similar procedures in their efforts to control quality. These procedures typically included the collection of a predetermined number of samples from a production shift, followed by the testing or analysis of the samples in a laboratory. Statistically based sampling plans were used to determine the acceptability of each production lot. If the number of defective samples exceeded the specification for a particular product, the entire production lot would be rejected. If the number of defective samples did not exceed the specified limit, the production lot would be accepted. The management of quality control was based on product specifications, lot acceptance criteria, and finished product testing.

Despite the applications of contemporary quality control procedures, foodborne illnesses caused by the new food ingredients and products continued to occur. It was discovered that food safety incidents, including foodborne illness outbreaks, were sometimes caused even when the implicated production lot of food was determined to be in compliance with all of its specifications. Repeated incidents revealed a fundamental flaw in quality control procedures that prevented the detection and prevention of such incidents. That fundamental flaw was the inability o...