Gerencia y Administración Del Proceso De Fiscalización y Liquidación

A local restaurant has received no stars following a food-hygiene inspection by the local council’s food-safety team. The owner of the restaurant was fined £6000 and ordered to pay £380 in court costs after pleading guilty to four food-hygiene offences.

Food-hygiene inspectors found thick black grease on the floor, staff dressed in dirty overalls, uncovered food lying around and dirty work surfaces.

As part of the Scores on the Doors scheme, the hygiene rating was published on the Internet. Several stories about the restaurant’s hygiene failures were also reported in the local press.

185 Foodqualityandmicrobiologicalcriteria

Microbiological food quality encompasses microbiological safety, acceptability in terms of shelf life and consistency. These terms are defined as follows:

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sensory properties of food in an unacceptably short time.

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What is the difference between good-quality and poor-quality foods? Microbiological criteria were developed in an attempt to answer this question. There is a need to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable food quality. To this end, there are three types of microbiological criteria:

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A standard is specified by law and enforced by regulatory agencies. For example, milk standards were introduced in the UK in 1982. Farmers were told that the bacterial count in raw milk was too high and that better hygienic practices on the farm would reduce the count. They were then paid less for their milk by the Milk Marketing Board if the count exceeded specified limits. Within 4 months of introducing the new standard, the bacterial counts dropped dramatically across the country. About three quarters of the milk produced in England now has a count of less than 1000 colony forming units per millilitre (cfu/mL).

A specification is a criterion applied in commerce. It is a contractual condition of acceptance set by a food processor or retailer on a supplier. For example, a retailer can specify the maximum number of microbial counts per gram (or cfu/g) for frozen peas supplied by a processor.

A guideline is an advisory criterion for microbiological acceptability of a food. Professional bodies and government agencies can set and publish guidelines but there is no obligation by law to stick to them. For example, the Chilled Food Association has produced a guide on the ‘Shelf life of ready-to-eat food in relation to L. monocytogenes’ intended for food businesses (see weblink at end of chapter).

A European Regulation EC 2073/2005 on microbiological criteria for foods came into force at the same time as the Hygiene Regulation 852/2004 in January 2006. Regulation EC 2073/2005 requires food businesses to use the criteria specified in the Regulation’s extended annex to verify and validate their food- safety management systems based on HACCP principles.

The regulation lays down food-safety criteria for several important pathogens, such as Salmonella and L. monocytogenes, particularly in ready-to-eat foods. For

186 Legislationandmaintainingstandards

example, a ready-to-eat food such as a sandwich is deemed satisfactory if Salmonella cannot be detected in 25 g of the food at the point of sale. If, however, Salmonella is detected, the food is deemed unacceptable or potentially hazardous.

The regulation also lays down process hygiene or quality criteria, measured in a variety of ways. For example, total bacterial counts known as aerobic colony counts per gram (cfu/g) of a food can be used to categorize a food as satisfactory, acceptable or unsatisfactory. In the sandwich example above, a count of less than 103 _{(1000) cfu/g is satisfactory, a count between 10}3 _{and 10}4 _{is acceptable and} anything over 104 _{is considered unsatisfactory.}

Some public health authorities have taken the regulations further and developed more detailed guidelines. For example, in the UK, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) has published guidelines concerning Campylobacter, E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, Shigella, Vibrio cholerae and V. parahaemolyticus, Bacillus (including B. cereus and other species), C. perfringens, L. monocytogenes and S. aureus. Advice on the interpretation of results for hygiene indicator organisms, the likely cause and suggested actions is also provided.

As we have seen in previous chapters, food safety is neither guaranteed nor controlled by microbiological testing of the finished food product. A functioning HACCP-based system is key to demonstrating due diligence. However, microbiological testing can be used to validate and monitor processes and Critical Control Points identified during a HACCP plan.

Since microbes are unevenly distributed throughout a food, microbiological testing is subject to a complex statistical sampling design to ensure that the results are representative of the entire batch. Absolute confidence in quality of a batch of food is only possible if all of it is tested, leaving none to eat! Consequently, decisions are a compromise between practicability and estimate of quality.

The aerobic colony count can be used to measure bacterial load on surfaces (see Chapter 3 for more details on swabbing surfaces quantitatively). There are no laws (as yet) specifying bacterial counts for surfaces but some recommendations and guidelines for maximum surface loads exist. For example, in the UK the HPA deems counts of 10 cfu/cm2 _{or less from a cleaned ready-to-eat food preparation} surface as acceptable, whereas anything higher than this count would be considered unsatisfactory. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) considers that the count on food-processing equipment should be 5 cfu/cm2 _{or less before} work begins. Similar microbial surface counts after cleaning have been advocated by the Swedish Food Standards Agency. Some studies have used a threshold count of 2.5 cfu/cm2 _{for evaluating cleaning regimes.}

In this chapter, we have focused primarily on UK and European food law. Food legislation may be substantially different in other countries although the principles of HACCP are being widely adopted and enshrined in national and international legislation. In the USA, food legislation is undergoing significant change with the

187 Weblinks

enactment of the Food Safety Modernization Act in January 2011. The aim of the Act is to shift the focus of regulation from responding to food-safety problems to preventing them. Major reforms are anticipated over a period of 18 months to 3 years. Weblinks for keeping up to date with US legislation are provided at the end of the chapter.

Further reading

Sprenger, RA (2009). Hygiene for management: a text for food safety courses. Highfield, Doncaster, UK.

Weblinks

UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) guidelines, information,