In an era defined by the growing urgency of environmental concerns, one resource stands as a profound global challenge: water. As one of the planet’s most precious and scarce natural resources, water ranks as a top environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concern. While various industries worldwide grapple with the challenges of resource scarcity and environmental degradation, the food and beverage processing sectors require substantial water consumption for their everyday operations.

The Hidden Costs of Water Consumption

Whether used as an ingredient, an essential component of food preparation and production, or a tool for upholding workplace hygiene, the quantum of water consumed by a processor’s operations can quickly add up. According to Food Northwest, poultry processing can utilize anywhere from 3.5 to 7.0 gallons of water for each four-pound bird. For tasks like carcass washing and cleanup, beef processing can require a range of 350 to 550 gallons per animal. Meanwhile, contingent on their respective efficiencies, breweries can use between seven and 10 gallons of water to craft a single gallon of beer, and cold soft drink plants generally require between 1.3 and three gallons of water per gallon of packed soft drink.

The intricacies of the water–energy nexus further compound the cost of water. When water needs to be heated—for activities such as cooking, pasteurization, or cleaning—energy is expended to raise its temperature. This correlation holds true for various processes in the food and beverage industry, such as heating, cooling, pumping, mixing, and more. In essence, the greater the volume of water involved, the higher the concurrent energy consumption will be.

Amidst these complex dynamics, the consequences of substantial water consumption extend not only to food and beverage processors, but also to the environment. As ESG concerns rise to the forefront of many corporate agendas, food and beverage processors find themselves under growing pressures to align their operations with sustainable practices to manage water responsibly.

Safeguarding Operational Efficiency, Food Safety, and Hygiene

As the industry looks for ways to reduce water consumption, the quality of water used in food and beverage processing also has a significant impact on a facility’s long-term success. From the perspective of operational efficiency, pristine water quality ensures that equipment remains free of excessive scaling and fouling, which not only helps to extend the lifespan of machinery, but also reduces the need for frequent maintenance. In turn, this can lead to improved process efficiency and minimized downtime.

Courtesy of Diversey.

Additionally, water used for processes such as heating and cooling is more effective when it’s free from impurities or those impurities are managed properly. Clean water heats and cools more quickly and requires less energy to reach the desired temperature, leading to energy savings and more streamlined processing. According to the Bureau of Standards, steam boiler systems with only 1/16” scale formation can result in 11% efficiency losses, while cooling systems with biological film as thick as a piece of scotch tape are four times more insulative than mineral scaling and can reduce heat transfer efficiency by 7% to 10%.

Even more critical than operational efficiency is the importance of water quality in upholding the strict standards of food safety. Because water serves as an essential component for cleaning and sanitizing, it’s critical to keep this water free from harmful microorganisms. Contaminated water can introduce pathogens into the processing environment, leading to compromised products and the potential for an outbreak of foodborne illnesses—a grave scenario that no processor can afford to overlook. Furthermore, a clean processing environment, supported by high-quality water, contributes to a safer workplace for employees.

Enhancing and Understanding Your Current System

Despite the inevitable need for many water-intensive processes in the food and beverage sector, various methods exist to help processors optimize their water use and, ultimately, consume less over time.

One approach lies in elevating the efficiency of wastewater treatment processes. Since wastewater treatment is already necessary, simply enhancing your current process for reuse in non-potable processes can be a huge advantage. Effectively treating wastewater laden with organic matter often involves methods of filtration, sedimentation, coagulation, and chemical treatment to disinfect and purify the water. Utilizing reclaimed water provides an alternative water supply, enhances operational efficiency, helps cut costs, and strengthens profitability.

The growth of data tracking and analysis presents another method by which food processors can aim to optimize their water use and progressively reduce consumption over time. By leveraging data tracking, food processors can gain a comprehensive understanding of their current water consumption patterns and identify areas of improvement. Monitoring these insights in real time not only helps processors identify deviations from expected consumption levels but also provides an opportunity to predict and anticipate future trends. By embracing data-driven decision making, processors can track their progress over time, examine real-time cost of water and energy consumption, and develop customized water management strategies to fit their specific needs.

A Path to a More Sustainable Future

As the processing industry looks toward a greener future, the management of water use and water quality is a strategic method for a more sustainable transformation. Much like any systemic shift, the journey toward optimized water use must begin with a deeper understanding of the current processes in place. Providing a tangible “value advantage” as a supplier is a critical component needed for both customer and supplier to be successful. By integrating advanced water treatment technologies and continually measuring growth and development when it comes to water use, processors can minimize waste, harness their water’s potential for multiple cycles of use, and optimize processes to save time and energy, all while quantifying the value of these improvements.

Ultimately, water use for the food and beverage processing industry extends beyond mere consumption; it also comes down to responsible stewardship and maximizing the value of every drop.

Sperling is a project manager at Diversey, Food and Beverage and has 25 years of experience with food and beverage applications. Reach him at barry.sperling@diversey.com. Burke is an application project manager at Solenis and has 31 years of experience in water treatment. Reach him at mburke@solenis.com.

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Today’s food processors face more complexities than ever in the sanitation process. Labor shortages, water scarcity, changing environmental regulations, and rising energy costs have created no shortage of challenges for food processors all over the globe. Droughts, climate change, the war in Ukraine, and other factors have prompted an urgency around water and utility management that the industry will have to grapple with for the foreseeable future.

It’s no secret that food processing and sanitation require large amounts of energy and water to reduce food safety risks; however, many processing facilities may lose precious resources through inefficiencies in processes and equipment, whether that means incremental loss through steam leakage or unnoticed water usage.

The cost to processors in both scenarios can be high and leaving water and utility management as an afterthought is no longer a viable option; however, runaway resource consumption not only impacts a company’s wallet, but it can also alter the efficiency and adequacy of the sanitization process and have sustainability implications. Food processors who want to cut costs and conserve resources while ensuring food safety need to prioritize total resource management.

Total Resource Management: Taking Advantage of Data

Many industries have capitalized on the wealth of insights that data analysis can provide; however, data analytics is a relatively untapped resource in the food processing industry, particularly in sanitation and resource management. With new software and data experts emerging in the industry, facilities can gain a bigger picture of their water and utilities use and monitor critical data points affecting efficiency, sustainability, compliance, and costs.

It is common for some processors to track basic resource use, such as flow and water and air pressure. But understanding exactly how those resources are consumed empowers food processors to get ahead of potentially significant losses before they even happen. Continued technological innovations allow for tracking detailed utility usage throughout an operation, allowing companies to expose leakages or areas of egregious use that may have gone unnoticed. With accurate insights, plant managers can address loss prevention and forecast their needs more accurately, ultimately conserving resources and optimizing their sanitization process.

Figure 1. Example of non-dynamic chemical consumption. Captured data provides how much was consumed in a single day with no insight into how the use changed through the cleaning event. Courtesy of Diversey Food and Beverage.

Going Beyond Surface-Level Tracking

Improving sanitation and efficiencies in food processing has been limited to periodic audits and automated equipment. Until recently, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) included high costs, so planning and design focused on the production metrics, such as volume and temperature, that would gain the most profitable use of investment.

For example, plant managers could measure the flow of chemicals used in open plant cleaning procedures daily, as seen in Figure 1. This information, however, doesn’t provide insights into where, why, or when usage varied so heavily between the two dates. It shows plant managers that something happened to cause the fluctuation, but without more detailed information, the facility is limited to what it can do to prevent future loss.

Beyond preventing potentially egregious losses such as those in the above scenario, dynamic data is also essential for monitoring fluctuations in resource use, as inconsistencies can lead to incremental losses—of both resources and money. “Small” changes are currently buried in plants using legacy sensors, monitors, and data, meaning that they have a massive opportunity for realizing savings and sustainability goals.

Why More Dynamic Data Matters for Sanitation

While awareness of these factors is important for cost savings and sustainability initiatives, these insights are also invaluable when it comes to chemistries and sanitation. Both overuse and underuse of chemicals can pose problems in the process. Chemical overuse means not only lost chemicals, but also potentially damaged equipment over time. Underuse can be even costlier, posing food safety and product recall risks.

Figure 2. Example of dynamic chemical consumption. Consumption data is captured in hour/minute intervals. This method presents data that reveal cleaning start/stop and volume spike periods throughout the cleaning event. Courtesy of Diversey Food and Beverage.

Beyond chemistries, having the full story of the resource management in your plant can help you get ahead of other food safety and sustainability issues, as well. Take, for example, clean-in-place systems in dairy and beverage plants. For an effective run, a plant needs to heat water to a certain temperature for a prolonged period. If heat is lost in that process, the plant may have to rerun the cycle, which means valuable resources can go down the drain. If the facility doesn’t have access to the data alerting it to a potentially non-compliant clean, that poses a food safety risk.

The Next Level of Tracking Is Dynamic and Continuous

The good news is that plant managers now can have greater visibility into these issues—down to the hour—with data analytics programs, dynamic flow meters, and auditors who go beyond a single audit. Advances in analytics software give us insight into more factors than ever before: electricity, water, and steam flow; water temperature; gallons of water used per minute; and others.

Such programs also allow for continuous monitoring of these factors, which means that facilities can now understand where they’re losing steam or electricity, as well as how much water is being distributed, for how long, at what pressure, and at what temperature.

Figure 2 illustrates the more dynamic factors that new programs can measure. Here, we can see the variations in cleaning foam and sanitizer use over several hours, rather than at the end of the day. This information allows us to focus on the factors that could have contributed to the variances on that shift.

Figure 3 shows the gallons of heated process water used per minute in one plant over an hour, a day, and a week.

These abilities are crucial—they can alert plant managers to potential issues and tell the story of what happened during a shift. Plant managers can pinpoint outliers, such as a water hose operating at a pressure that is too high, to identify potential causes and prevent future losses. Such information can help plant managers take corrective action, keep stewardship top of mind, and—most importantly—avoid potential food safety concerns and unnecessary costs.

Figure 3. Water use data demonstrating flow rate and hourly, daily, and weekly volume aggregation. This data shows that while similar water needs were steady throughout the week during the production time period, volume rates changed dramatically, revealing the potential for water optimization. Courtesy of Diversey Food and Beverage.

Food processing facilities may, perhaps, have more challenges to navigate now than in the past. But they also have more information—and power—at their fingertips for getting ahead of those challenges. Knowledge-based services such as data analysis can help businesses across industries make more informed decisions, and the insights we can garner from new technology will be critical in helping food processors to meet sustainability and food safety goals.

As we continue to face issues such as inflation and water scarcity, it will be even more critical for food processors to harness the tools at their disposal to protect their customers, the bottom line, and, ultimately, their greatest resources.

Sperling is a project manager at Diversey, Food and Beverage. Reach him at barry.sperling@diversey.com.

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It’s been more than 100 years since Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle hit shelves. Since then, most consumers feel relatively comfortable and safe with current food standards; however, as consumer habits continue to evolve, with more food being purchased online and distributed through a network of unknown entities, the bad news is that we are not out of the jungle yet. About 48 million people in the U.S. (one in six) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year from foodborne diseases, according to recent data from CDC.

The last mile of food delivery could prove to be one of the most dangerous unless some real changes are made. Currently, around 60% of Americans order takeout or delivery at least once a week. There is no sign of a slowdown in online ordering; it’s growing 300% faster than in-house dining. And they want it fast, faster, fastest: 33% of consumers say they would pay a higher fee for faster delivery.

When you combine this online growth with a high demand for speed, a thick jungle of food consumption dangers lies ahead.

Innovation without Regulation

The COVID-19 pandemic demanded innovation and rapid acceleration from last mile food delivery options. Consumers prioritized safety over all else and looked for options that allowed them to avoid crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Distanced drop-offs and fast home delivery options became the norm for many consumers.

This rapid innovation existed in a vacuum, however, without government regulations. A gap was created between social distancing safety and food consumption safety. While cooked food models are relatively safe, groceries and meal kits face large risks around refrigeration and contamination. Food shipped directly to consumer homes needs to stay at a safe temperature to prevent the growth of germs that could cause serious illness. This includes mail-order food and subscription meal kits, according to the CDC.

Risk Factors

Currently, there are many factors that could lead to food safety failures. The most basic of these are human error, limited professional equipment, and a gap in training programs. While intentions may be good, a lack of knowledge around contamination and cold-chain management could put individuals who rely on last mile delivery at risk.

The reliance of many local last mile programs on gig workers increases risk. Average, untrained people looking to supplement their income could unintentionally cross-contaminate groceries. For example, accidental placement of raw fish or meat alongside vulnerable raw produce items, or even simple mix-ups for those with food allergies, could be deadly.

Now, as COVID-19 cases wane and we are in a safer environment, businesses must take a moment to evaluate their last mile delivery structures and prioritize beyond distance drop-offs and fast home delivery.

Keep Ahead of the Curve

Innovation is typically driven by one of two things: consumer demand or litigation. Life during the COVID-19 pandemic saw innovation by way of consumer demand; however, the risks listed above could force demand by way of litigation if businesses are not proactive. Rather than wait for these events to happen, some companies are choosing to innovate ahead of the curve and solve problems before they arise.

A strong example of this type of problem solving comes from Japanese logistics company Yamato Holdings. The company wanted to reduce last mile delivery risks to build trust in the industry, grow the market, and expand its business globally. Yamato Holdings partnered with BSI to develop a food delivery standard, known commonly as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS), for their company to follow. The fast-track standard establishes best practice in refrigerated delivery services, bringing benefits for both businesses and consumers.

The creation of PAS 1018, which has since been adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), defines good practice in a fast-growing and important industry, helping to protect and reassure consumers, expand the global market, and position Yamato as a trustworthy leader in the field.

Solution: Standards

Standards provide a solid foundation for organizations to operate in great periods of change. The United States adopted The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) of 2011 to transform its food safety landscape and ensure that higher standards were met across the country. While FSMA prompted rapid change that includes cold chain controls for portions of the delivery phase, innovation across the industry has left room for error in the food industry. The rise of mobile applications, consumer ordering behaviors, and pressure on businesses for speed and delivery options have all added to the risk factors across the past 11 years.

The solution to many of these modernizations is simple: updated standards. When companies like Yamato update standards to fit the modern environment, they significantly reduce the risk of litigation and consumer complaints. Some updates from the comprehensive PAS included:

• Monitoring and improving the refrigerated delivery service, including parcel handling;
• Transportation of chilled or frozen parcels in temperature-controlled vehicles via geographical routing systems;
• Requirements for resources, equipment, operations, and communications; and
• Conditions for operation sites, work instructions, operational manuals, and staff training.

The results of adopting these standards can bring companies dividends for years to come. Having stringent standards helps build trust with consumers, partners, and investors alike, and ultimately expands businesses. Standards also push industries to increase quality and consistency to remain competitive. Finally, they are better for our consumers; consumers who enjoy safe, quality food will ultimately have a better quality of life.

Bushwhacking Barriers

While we are not out of the jungle yet, we have been given strong tools to help us forge a path forward. By adopting rigorous standards and holding last service deliverers accountable, it is possible for us to better regulate the innovations that came about during the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be up to businesses to proactively monitor for food safety issues and try to become leaders in safety before pressures from governments and consumers make it a mandate. Those organizations that choose to use globally recognized standards, like ISO 23412, an international standard that aims to set guidelines for refrigerated delivery service providers, to prove their promise of safe food distribution will have a competitive advantage in a highly competitive industry.

Coole is director of food and retail supply chain at BSI, a standards and regulations organization based in the U.K. Reach him at neil.coole@bsigroup.com.

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In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on California’s Proposition 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative, which sets minimum requirements for animals in confined housing. The proposition, which has been quite controversial, has strong support from both sides.

Originally passed by California voters on November 6, 2018, the legislation requires farm owners and operators to house covered animals in non-cruel ways, and sets minimum standards for freedom of movement, cage-free design, and floor space. Applicable animals include breeding pigs, veal calves, and egg-laying hens. Specifically, the law prohibits selling shell eggs, liquid eggs, whole pork meat, or whole veal meat from animals housed in inhumane spaces to California. Any sale of an illegal (i.e., non-compliant) pork product is punishable by a $1,000 fine per violation or a 180-day prison sentence.

Effects of the Law

Prop 12 became effective on January 1, 2022. However, in 2022, a Sacramento County superior court judge ruled that some of the proposition’s pork provisions wouldn’t become effective until 180 days after the California Department of Food and Agriculture finalized Prop 12 regulations, which occurred on September 7, 2022, says Kate Brindle, senior specialist of public policy in the Farm Animal Protection Department at The Humane Society of the United States in Gaithersburg, Md.

Prop 12 has introduced significant uncertainty into the pork industry, says Michael Formica, chief legal strategist at the National Pork Producers Council in Des Moines, Iowa, who believes that the ruling is unconstitutional. “One state can’t make laws regulating commerce between states,” he says. “This creates regulatory and financial chaos.”

Under Prop 12, farmers raising pigs that provide pork products to the California market must register and pay California agents to inspect their farms. “This will create serious biosecurity threats nationwide,” Formica says. Having out-of-state inspectors visit multiple farms increases the risk of disease spreading from farm to farm, he adds. Furthermore, he says that there aren’t enough inspectors to conduct all the inspections and maintain proper biosecurity protocols.

According to David Stender, a swine field specialist at Iowa State University in Cherokee, some larger companies that were already planning to remodel have already remodeled their facilities to Prop 12 standards. But most smaller operations haven’t made changes for various reasons, including the fact that many smaller operators have seen sows attack each other in pens during mixing and feeding events.

Simultaneously, the harvest plant slowdown from the COVID-19 pandemic severely burdened most small operations financially, especially those that lacked a packer marketing contract, Stender says. This made it prohibitive to make financial investments while exiting the industry.

Furthermore, Stender says it was impossible for producers to obtain advanced marketing contracts that covered the cost of enlarging pens. As the proposition’s deadline approached, the cost of remodeling skyrocketed due to the expense of building materials. There was also a scarcity of labor due to the need for remodeling and learning how to implement new systems.

Proponent Arguments

States have long played roles in protecting their residents by removing unsafe and morally objectionable products. “Prop 12 does exactly that, by ensuring that Californians won’t be subjected to buying products they overwhelmingly consider cruel and unsafe,” Brindle says.

According to Shawn Stevens, Esq., founder of the Food Industry Counsel, LLC, in Milwaukee, Wisc., and member of Food Quality & Safety’s Editorial Advisory Board, “Supporters argued that the law applies equally to producers located within and outside of California, and that they will only have a minimal impact outside of California.”

Opponent Arguments

In presenting their case to the Supreme Court, challengers of Prop 12 called the law unconstitutional because it serves to regulate the pork industry outside of California and, therefore, stands in the way of interstate commerce, Stevens says. Opponents also argued that Prop 12 regulations will drastically change farming throughout the country as producers shift to comply with its requirements.

Producers located outside of California argued that they weren’t able to vote on the proposition, which now places an undue burden on them to invest capital in retrofitting production facilities and bear the cost of California inspectors traveling to their farms, says Dan Scheitrum, PhD, assistant professor in the Agribusiness Department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

Outlook on the Court’s Decision

How the Supreme Court will rule in 2023 is anyone’s guess. “We can’t speculate on how the justices will rule,” Formica says. “However, during oral arguments, the justices seemed to recognize that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate commerce among states, and the structural framework of the Constitution prohibit one state from regulating activities in other states as Prop 12 does.”

Adds Travis Cushman, deputy general counsel of litigation and public policy at the American Farm Bureau Federation, “The framers of the Constitution wisely sought to prevent the balkanization that would result from states using commerce to export their own preferred policies into other states.”

During oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court, Stevens notes that the justices had targeted questions for each side, demonstrating possible concerns with both sides of the argument. “The Court may decide to remand the matter back to the California courts for additional record development or hearings,” he says.

On the flip side, Brindle says that by upholding Prop 12, the Supreme Court would validate the long-recognized authority of states to pass laws that protect their residents’ health, safety, and morals. “Regardless of the Court’s decision, it’s clear that consumers don’t want inhumane and unsafe products,” Brindle says.

Implications for the Pork Industry

If the Supreme Court upholds Prop 12, the pork industry nationally will need to ­prioritize moving toward compliance with Prop 12 requirements in order to continue selling in California, Stevens says. The initial cost of complying with Prop 12 rests on pig farmers. “They will incur the costs of extensive renovations or construction costs associated with building new ­facilities,” Formica says. Costs are currently estimated to be $3,500 or more per sow.

Pig farmers will also face losses in productivity as they move to new housing and management systems. “Prop 12 will lead to greater concentration in the U.S. pork industry and the loss of individual family farms and will mean significantly higher pork prices at the grocery store and fewer consumers who can afford this high-quality protein,” Formica says.

Stender expects that Prop 12 will likely cause a two-tiered market, with higher-priced meat going to California due to scarcity of compliant pork and lower-priced meat for other states due to the sudden excess supply.

“Some national producers may elect to stop selling in California altogether,” Stevens says. “Other producers who wish to continue selling to California most likely won’t limit compliance to only pork intended to be sold in California and will instead universally adopt measures to ensure compliance with Prop 12 for all products.”

Furthermore, the possibility that California or another state could pass other laws that change housing requirements may bring too much uncertainty for smaller operations to continue. “Ultimately, the increased costs and uncertainty could lead to further consolidation and integration in the industry,” Cushman says.

Farmers might also cease pork production if Prop 12 is upheld because the law would prohibit farmers from raising their animals in the way that they and their veterinarians believe is best for their animals and employees, Cushman says.

Despite concerns verbalized by meat-producing organizations, Brindle notes that many pork producers do support Prop 12 and are already phasing out cruel confinement for some or all of their products. In fact, a meat industry trade publication, Meatingplace.com, recently noted that group housing for mother pigs now comprises about 38% of U.S. pork production.

In another example, Perdue Premium Meat Company, Inc., issued an amicus brief supporting the proposition, arguing that forward-thinking pork producers are able and eager to meet Prop 12 standards, Brindle says. In the brief, the company states, “Niman Ranch’s farms have been meeting Prop 12 standards and producing humanely raised pork for years. Hormel announced two years ago that it will do so. Even without Prop 12, the market has shifted to create strong demand for pork that is produced more humanely. Prop 12 reflects that shift in consumer preferences.”

Tyson Foods and Clemens Food Group, two other large pork producers, have also publicly stated that they are planning to comply with the proposition without any major effects on their bottom lines, Brindle says.

Other Potential Outcomes

If the Supreme Court upholds Prop 12, there will likely be many implications for stakeholders beyond pork producers. Regarding food safety, Brindle says that 2020 research from the United Nations Environmental Programme has shown that the extreme confinement of farm animals facilitates the spread of pathogens that can cause dangerous foodborne illnesses or could potentially lead to future pandemics.

In a brief submitted in support of Prop 12, the American Public Health Association, Infectious Diseases Society of America, and Center for Food Safety conclude that the proposition addresses risks to food safety and public health by restricting the sale of pork products in California that are produced using intensive confinement practices, Brindle says. According to the brief, “More space reduces stress in sows, which mitigates the cascade of stress-related negative health impacts on sows and their piglets destined for slaughter, which—ultimately—reduces risk to California’s food safety and public health.”

Regarding costs and the effects on consumers, “If Prop 12 holds, we will see an increase in food prices and supply chain disruptions,” Formica says. A 2010 University of Minnesota study estimated that it will cost between $1.9 billion and upward of $3.2 billion to convert sow barns to group pens.

Another aspect that will likely increase pork costs is third-party verification and labeling, says Stender.

Furthermore, Stevens says that a ruling supporting Prop 12 could provide states with a precedent to strictly regulate other portions of the food industry, potentially with broad and significant implications.

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Functional health and medicinal products containing cannabidiol (CBD) are growing in popularity, and the U.S. market for CBD is now worth $1.62 million a year, according to research from statistica.com.

Traditional extraction processes do not always capitalize on the latest evaporation technology, and there are a number of techniques for extracting CBD from the hemp plant. Most of these techniques require the use of solvents that are effective at separating the CBD from other chemical compounds found in the plant. Once the CBD has been extracted, the solvent is evaporated off, leaving pure CBD oil.

Some methods use supercritical carbon dioxide in a closed-loop extractor to extract the CBD under pressure, resulting in a liquid mixture of CO₂ and CBD, which must then be separated by evaporation, but a step involving alcohol solvents is usually still required. For this reason, liquid solvents based on alcohols (ethanol or isopropyl alcohol) or hydrocarbons (butane or propane) are also sometimes used and are much simpler and more straightforward. Unless the evaporation step is carried out correctly, however, some alcohol residues may remain in the CBD oil mixture.

It is important to remember that even where CO₂ extraction is used, a further stage involving alcohol solvents will still be required. Each method has its own benefits and drawbacks, and the best method for one manufacturer may not be right for another.

Once the CBD oil has been separated from the solvent, it is then usually refined and distilled to produce pure CDB oil that is free from other compounds, such as THC, waxes, and lipids. The exact nature of this refining process will impact the chemical profile of the resulting CBD product and depends on the extraction method used.

The Basics of Evaporation

Evaporation is the separation of a liquid from dissolved or suspended solids using energy to make the liquid volatile so that the required solids are left behind. Evaporation differs from dehydration or drying in that the product of evaporation is a concentrated liquid, not a dry solid; however, evaporation can be combined with dehydration or drying processes. It also differs from distillation in that the concentrated solution, rather than the condensed evaporate, is the valuable product.

Evaporation systems have been around for more than 100 years and are used widely in the food, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries for a wide variety of purposes. Each sector has different reasons for choosing evaporation as a process, and there are appropriate differences in implementation. For example, in the food industry, products may be concentrated to increase shelf life, reduce volume or weight, and decrease storage and transport costs. A common example is the concentration of fresh fruit juice to enable the extension of processing periods beyond the harvest window of the crop. In contrast, in the pharmaceutical sector, evaporation is often used to create concentrated solutions that can then be dried to create powdered products, as is the case with many CBD products.

Although the basic principle of evaporation remains the same—the removal of water (or another solvent) from a solution by converting that water or solvent into its vapor phase—there are a number of established and novel techniques to achieve this under different temperature and pressure conditions. The type of ­evaporation most suitable for a particular purpose depends on several factors, including the nature of the solvent and the solution, the required end product, and the energy available.

In practice, depending on the technology used, evaporation can produce solutions containing anything from 0% to 92% solids. High-efficiency evaporation is more energy and cost efficient than drying or other methods of removing water and produces higher concentrations of solids than other methods of concentration, such as reverse osmosis or ultrafiltration. Evaporation may be carried out as a batch or in a continuous process. It consists of two elements—a heating phase and a vapor/liquid separation phase—although both may be incorporated in a single vessel.

Considerations for CBD Evaporation

To maintain the characteristics of the CBD oil, low-temperature evaporation techniques have to be used, often involving separate vacuum extraction systems to reduce the boiling point of the solvent.

At a small scale, a laboratory-based rotary evaporation system, with or without vacuum extraction, may be suitable, and indeed is one of the most common systems used today. But as the market grows and producers need to scale up production, they are likely to look to the type of low-temperature evaporator used in pharmaceutical or food production. In addition, because maximizing solvent recovery with such a system requires a high level of vacuum control, it often requires skilled oversight.

Multi-stage falling-film evaporation processes are highly efficient and allow much higher throughputs. As a continuous system, it does not need to be disassembled and cleaned between each run, and clean-in-place (CIP) is used to maintain hygienic conditions and prevent contamination. Having different temperature regimens in each evaporation stage improves ethanol removal, and the unit is highly efficient because each evaporation stage is held at a lower pressure than the previous one.

In falling film evaporators, the product is introduced at the top of a vertical tube bundle, where it is evenly distributed and falls downward as a thin film against the tube wall. On the outside of the tube, a heating medium, often steam, is applied to raise the temperature of the product, and evaporation takes place at the liquid film surface. The vapor generated as the product is evaporated travels down with the liquid film, and the steam velocity helps to move the film along the surface of the tube wall.

This method of evaporation offers several advantages, including very high levels of heat transfer and lower power consumption than some other types of evaporation. Finally, because evaporation takes place inside the evaporator tubes themselves, no temperature gradient is applied to the recirculating product. These characteristics of falling film evaporators make them particularly well suited for applications in which the service fluid temperature is close to the evaporation temperature.

Hale is international sales and marketing director for HRS Heat Exchangers. Reach him at matt.hale@uk.hrs.he.com.

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A company whose founding dates as far back as the original 13 states and Martha Washington’s handwritten apple pie recipe has been named winner of the prestigious 2022 Food Quality & Safety award for small businesses.

The award, presented annually by Food Quality & Safety, honors the dedication and achievement of organizations that make significant contributions to upholding the highest food standards supported by quantifiable results. This year, our judging panel deemed that King Arthur Baking Company, born in 1790 in Boston but now headquartered in Norwich, Vt., distinguished itself from other businesses in the category with its investment in technology and a strong food safety culture.

The company’s food safety culture, which is backed by a distinctive model of employee ownership, is so strong that the company almost doesn’t have to wait for an outside audit to identify areas of improvement, says Robin Beane, senior director of manufacturing, quality, regulatory, and safety for the company. “From the group of people who manufacture the products to the people on the front line, they have a keen eye toward anything that is out of place,” she says. “They’re always raising their hand that they saw something in a raw ingredient or a piece of fiber from a bag that shouldn’t be there. They pay very close attention to the quality and safety of our products.”

Learning from Each Other

Beane says the company uses external experts and a highly trained quality team, in addition to employees who are well trained in quality, to train its employees. She herself is also a food safety instructor who teaches a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) course from the International HACCP Alliance (IHA).

The company teaches the IHA HACCP course internally to a diverse group of employees using its own products and examples to increase the understanding of HACCP principles and food safety within the company. More than 50 employees at all levels of the company have passed the IHA course. All employee training is documented, implemented, and includes annual refresher courses. Beane says the quality assurance team is already highly qualified through its members’ many years of experience in the food industry and educational backgrounds that include microbiology, nutrition, and culinary arts.

IHA HACCP training includes developing, maintaining, and monitoring food safety plans and setting corrective action procedures and critical control points. It also includes personal hygiene for handling food products and food contact surfaces. Employees are taught good manufacturing practices and are instructed on food handling, food processing and equipment, sampling and test methods for raw materials, packaging, work-in-progress and finished products, allergen management, and environmental monitoring. They also are taught how to detect food fraud, which Beane says is a growing problem, especially in the face of supply chain disruptions. The facility is also Safe Quality Foods (SQF) certified, which includes an additional training component and meets FDA training requirements for a preventive controls qualified individual (PCQI).

The annual training program is presented in three separate sessions so employees can acquire a thorough education and have time to discuss what they learned with each other. Beane says that this approach has increased understanding of the company’s policies, programs, sanitation, and other operating procedures among employees.

The company says the training empowers each employee to “own food quality and safety every day” as they produce products. Through key performance indicators, King Arthur has seen a reduction of scrap, a significant increase of first-time-right metrics, and other improvements. Before developing the comprehensive training program, the company says, there was too much costly scrapped raw materials, and with increased training and tracking through KPI metrics, a reduction in waste has been realized.

There are also single-topic trainings on corrective action, preventative action, and cross trainings of employees to improve and expand employee knowledge. Personnel also receive annual performance reviews to verify comprehension and retention of training content.

Innovations and Food Safety Investments

The company has implemented a few software systems in the past year or so, one of which allows it to stay in contact with and closely monitor suppliers so that employees can get information in a timely manner and make sure that the raw materials it receives are safe.

The supplier management software provides a digital document and ingredient data management platform so King Arthur can review all approved supplier documents before they expire and remain compliant with Food Safety and Modernization Act (FSMA) regulations. The company uses the platform to create a report card and identify trends in performance, quality, or safety. It can put suppliers on hold or even inactivate them if there is a problem and there are no improvements.

King Arthur also procured a productivity and quality software system that helps it reduce paper waste. The system lets the company perform and track quality checks in real time and creates data for statistical process control. The program can deliver in-process triggers such as warn, fail, or pass at strategic quality points during production. Every record can be reviewed while production continues, and a line or process can be audited without disrupting production. A PCQI conducts a final review to meet FSMA requirements.

The company has also invested in a water moisture meter for its raw material certificate of analysis verification, which ensures its raw materials meet specifications when they arrive at its warehouse. A new colorimeter measures the color of flours to ensure consistent milling. The company has increased the number of ATP units in the factory to verify that sanitation requirements are met.

Even smaller investments make a difference in product quality. King Arthur has invested in gram scales to improve accuracy, as well as better lighting in multiple areas to make inspecting lines for quality and sanitation easier. It has added an additional metal detector to help reduce foreign objects, such as a piece of a conveyor belt, that may inadvertently get into a raw material. It has automated the capping process on its jar line and added a fume arm in its batching area to reduce airborne particles.

Vigilance about safety is especially important as the food industry faces more recalls, war that impacts availability, and food fraud, says Beane, adding that every company needs to be aware of these attacks on the food supply and make choices on new and evolving technologies that provide the tools to combat these challenges.

This year, the company plans to make additional investments, Beane says, including new blenders, conveyor systems, and new printers to help code products for traceability efforts.

Food Safety Plan with Multiple Inputs

King Arthur makes every effort to assure its food safety plan is complete. Beane says that the company brings together employees from different parts of the company to review the plan to ensure nothing is missing. That includes workers from quality assurance, purchasing, warehouse, research and development, manufacturing, shipping and receiving, and retail.

The hazards the company monitors include pathogenic microorganisms that can cause illness, food allergens or production chemicals, and foreign objects that might cause injury or choking. Flour might be thought of as a dry product, but it is a raw agricultural product in which Salmonella and E. coli can thrive. It is important to watch for rodents and flour beetles and, in the summer, flies or mosquitoes, which could come in through door openings. The company makes sure there are no bushes or grass around the perimeter where such insects or vermin could hide.

The company has developed a hazard analysis risk-based preventive controls food safety plan that conforms to the 12 steps in the Codex Alimentarius Commission’s HACCP guidelines, the current version of the SQF code, and FSMA. King Arthur’s PCQI, system quality manager, food safety regulatory manager, and senior director of quality and regulatory developed the plan and collectively oversee and maintain it.

Several food safety plans are in place to cover all products manufactured at the Vermont facility.

Each food safety plan reflects preventative controls and HACCP principles and includes procedures to monitor and implement preventive controls for all identified hazards. Controls include corrective actions and verification procedures. The company has descriptions for all finished products, as well as information relevant to product safety, such as pH, water activity, composition, and storage conditions.

Beane says that the company has a robust audit program in place both for its suppliers and in-house operations. The responsibility and procedures to select, evaluate, approve, and monitor a supplier are handled by a cross-functional internal team comprising research and development, quality, regulatory, purchasing, and finance functions. The company uses a detailed supplier questionnaire at on-site supplier audits. It has supplier management software for all approved suppliers, audits, and required documents that are reviewed annually.

The company has trained its internal auditors, who are members of its quality team. They conduct regular inspections of the site and equipment to meet SQF certification requirements.

Environmental Impact

As early as 2007, the company began monitoring its environmental impact and, in 2019, appointed a vice president of sustainability. The company is a B Corp, or benefit corporation, meaning it meets certain standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. It partners with farmers and suppliers to encourage environmentally and socially responsible practices in line with its centuries-old stewardship heritage. “I ask those tough questions and gather the resources to answer them,” says Suzanne McDowell, vice president of corporate responsibility and sustainability at King Arthur. “This work pushes us to confront the challenges and dream more significantly about the positive impact we can make on our environment.”

McDowell wants to help create a more resilient, equitable, and ecologically sound future, starting with wheat, where decisions have the greatest impact, she adds.

Beane says that the employee–owners feel a sense of being part of the bigger picture as well in doing their part to assure their products are safe, sustainable, and of high quality. “We think of ourselves as bakers,” she says. “We are very good customers of our own products, and our families use our products.”

We think this speaks volumes about a company that has proven itself to be a cut above.

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An Ohio-based company that produces 22 million pounds of ready-to-cook chicken weekly, with a focus on accountability and product safety, was recently named winner of the 2022 Food Quality & Safety award in the large company category.

Case Farms Chicken of Winesburg, Ohio, which employs 3,300 associates across all of its facilities, distinguished itself from other businesses by growing a corporate culture of “getting it right” and focusing on the latest technology when it comes to food safety and quality.

The award, presented annually by Food Quality & Safety, honors the dedication and achievement of an organization that makes significant contributions to upholding the highest food standards supported by quantifiable results. This year, our panel of judges, composed of food quality and safety experts, determined that Case Farms demonstrated a comprehensive food safety and quality management program that included a corporate willingness to invest in advanced technology and improvements for food safety. Its Salmonella-reduction program yielded particularly strong results.

Founded in 1986 by Thomas R. Shelton, Case Farms started with the purchase of a family-owned farm called Case Egg & Poultry that included a processing plant in Winesburg, a hatchery in Strasburg, Ohio, and a food distribution center in Akron, Ohio. In its first year, Case Farms processed 135,000 chickens per week and had 140 employees. In the following decades, it grew by acquiring operations in North Carolina and Ohio.

The company’s core values are “honesty, accountability, trust, success, and diversity.” Its Winesburg processing facility employs 675 associates who manufacture fresh and frozen marinated and non-marinated products, including bone-in products, portion-controlled fillets, tenders, and nuggets. Customers include some of the largest and most recognized casual dining, food services, and quick-service restaurants currently available. The company has four facilities, with a corporate complex in Troutman, N.C.

Quality is the main topic at the company, says Larry Epling, senior director of quality assurance/food safety and regulatory, who has been with the company for seven years. “We meet with our founder and chairman of the board every Monday morning, and the first thing we talk about is our quality,” Epling says. “It’s been like that since he started the company 36 years ago.”

A Commitment to Invest in Technology

Case Farms saw a need to update its capabilities and move to new technologies when its customer base moved from using basic raw poultry products to value-added products geared toward quick-serve restaurant chains and casual dining establishments.

In the past year or so, the company has added technologies to maintain and improve food safety. These upgrades include a conveying system that eliminates the need for  associates to touch the product after it goes through the portion control sorters, reducing the potential for cross contamination. The system also helps reduce overall microorganism counts and, in turn, helps improve shelf life.

To further improve pathogen control, Case Farms uses Zee Co.’s Pathogen Control Center, a chemical intervention control system that offers precision concentration mixing and reporting for antimicrobial interventions. The system is accessible remotely around the clock and issues alerts to any disruption in the target ranges of concentrations. The processing flow includes three water jet cutting systems that include fillet-harvesting robots. This equipment aids in the reduction of the product handling of portion-control fillets, once again decreasing the possibility of cross contamination and lowering microbial loading by reducing human handling.

A variable retention time freezer helps prevent microbial growth by eliminating the long freeze times typical with conventional freezers. The enhanced freezing process also eliminates unnecessary product aging by not having product waiting to be transported to a freezer and long blast freezing times. That translates into additional days that a restaurant customer can use the product. The freezer can also reduce excess marinade. Products can be grouped and frozen independently according to their optimal freeze times, which locks in flavors and moisture.

Case Farms has installed new redundant systems to strengthen its product traceability system. That includes systems to affix product IDs and production dates and times for each case of food. The primary labeling system affixes essential information using a master case label. The secondary systems read the master bar code and spray the information onto the cases using inkjet printers. The printer data serves as a backup if any labels are lost.

The company has also added several technologies to help it improve and assure quality and respond more quickly to changing customer demands. The SafetyChain plant management platform helps improve compliance to the specifications of different customers, which reduces or eliminates product returns. Using the system, the company can also more efficiently identify and control defects using statistical process control measures. The system alerts workers when a failure occurs so they can respond quickly.

The CFS RoboScan can automatically scan barcodes on an entire pallet of finished product cases and generate a unique label for that pallet. The system is integrated into the company’s CGS R8 inventory management system. Before, workers had to manually scan every label before a pallet could be released. Case Farms partnered with CFS while the company was developing the technology, which has industry-wide applications. The Case Farms Winesburg location was used as a pilot site.

To ensure that marinade batches are consistently accurate, the Food Processing Equipment Co.’s automatic screen prompts and computer controls make sure the proper amounts of water and seasoning are added at the proper times so that the flavor matches its original formulation and customer expectations.

One big investment was the purchase of auto deboning equipment, which helped the company provide more consistent raw materials than having the meat manually deboned by workers. It is especially important to have this consistency for its portion-control equipment and products.

The water jet cutting systems that help with safety also help ensure product quality. They often help the company quickly adapt to changes requested by customers, who frequently update their menus and portion sizes. The systems help improve product yield, keep the product consistent, reduce waste, decrease labor, and increase productivity.

Salmonella Reduction

USDA pays a lot of attention to Salmonella in poultry. Out of an abundance of caution, Epling says, “We consider every bird coming into the plant to be positive,” adding that the company has designed a multi-hurdle intervention process to bring the number of positive chickens down to zero. He says that, obviously, not every bird is positive, but if the company runs its program predicated on that assumption, it should catch any pathogens that come in. In line with recent regulatory changes, Case Farms uses a multiple-hurdle approach to stamp out Salmonella across the production environment. The plan starts with a peracetic acid bath after slaughter and defeathering. This approach means that the failure of one intervention wouldn’t bring down the entire system.

Once the new system was installed at its Winesburg plant, the company conducted an efficacy study to determine optimum contact time. The system achieved better results in pathogen reduction by ensuring the antimicrobial remains on the chicken for a longer period of time. “We’re gaining more contact, which gives the antimicrobial more time to be effective,” Epling says.

The company has ordered two of the systems for the Winesburg plant. It has also tested the system at one of its North Carolina plants and has ordered it for that plant, too. The company is using what it learns to recommend whether the vaccines to immunize the birds need to be tweaked or new ones developed in order to further eliminate Salmonella before the pathogen gets into the plant.

Training Leads to Long-Term Company Viability

Case Farms relies on internal and external training programs and offers educational assistance and internal monitoring. It sees training as a tool for developing the company’s future leaders. It also employs subject-matter experts in food safety who are certified through the National Registry and ServSafe. Those two expert groups, individually and together, have developed the company’s internal online training sessions and are developing a food safety training program for all salaried supervisors and managers at its facilities.

Case Farms uses individual development plans to help key quality team members throughout the company progress to the next level, for example, from an hourly associate to a salaried supervisor. The company says it believes firmly that mentoring internally is the key to ensure consistency in product and critical programs for food quality and safety.

It used this approach in 2021 to help develop a HACCP coordinator into a facility quality assurance manager, and a quality assurance supervisor into a HACCP coordinator.

The company also offers a training program consisting of core subjects that includes SSOP execution, HACCP X-ray verification procedures, bird rinse sampling, and allergen control procedures. Employees also receive annual refresher training on their anniversary date using the company’s online, interactive Alchemy system. This refresher training includes 25 subjects, and about one-quarter of them are focused on food safety. Included training sessions cover preventing food con­tamination, foreign material control, and basic microbiology. The company has a partnership with the University of Arizona that allows eligible employees to continue their academic education at a reduced cost.

Senior Management Drives the Food Safety Plan

Case Farms has a comprehensive food safety plan using SSOP and HACCP as its foundation. The Winesburg facility has three separate HACCP plans for slaughter, raw intact meat, and raw non-intact meat and maintains seven critical control points at the plant.

The HACCP program is managed by a trained HACCP coordinator. The company has a cross-functional HACCP team. Each of its plans is reassessed annually. It conducts reassessments of the plans internally and occasionally uses a third-party consultant to validate its reassessment process.

The food safety program has multiple hurdles that use several separate programs to work in conjunction with each other to ensure product safety. Senior management drives and supports the company’s food safety mission. Epling says that the key to the company’s success is the food safety and quality leadership from all members of management, along with the education and training offered to associates; these ensure the safety of its products—from development all the way through to the consumer.

All of the company’s non-packaging vendors must supply an independent GFSI audit each year, and it also has a certified auditor on staff who conducts animal and quality systems audits.

Case Farms has partnered with Zee Co. to supply antimicrobial intervention compounds and conduct monthly audits of its intervention program. Additionally, the company has partnered with QSI as a contract sanitation service.

Sustainability

The company is committed to environmental sustainability.
One example of this commitment is its use of a new ­storage and distribution center in Winesburg that has eliminated the need to transport products to other cold storage facilities. This investment has reduced the company’s amount of landfill by moving from corrugated combo bins to reusable plastic ones, resulting in a reduction of 154,791 pounds of corrugated material going to a landfill in 2021 over the previous year’s rate, and it also reduces the use of paper.

Epling says that quality assurance is sometimes is seen as a cost center at a company because it doesn’t always garner a monetary profit. He sees it differently, however. “The reality is that increased quality brings you more business and brings more money to the bottom line,” he says.

We couldn’t agree more.

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With the end of 2022 upon us, data from the CDC showed that COVID-19 cases in the United States had been on the decline in recent months; however, cases are beginning to tick up over the past few weeks, which raises a question about the status of the pandemic: Is the pandemic (really) over?

Admittedly, many people in the U.S. have already returned to normal in their personal lives; few masks are seen in public these days and restaurant dining rooms are open. Supply chain concerns and personnel policy adjustments are still at the forefront of COVID-19 mitigation policies, but where does the food industry stand if another surge occurs? Are we better prepared than we were in March 2020? Are there new regulations or guidance to support risk mitigation? Will there be enforcement criteria going forward?

Nearly three years in, let’s look back at the food sector’s overall response and take a speculative peek into the future.

Current Data

Before evaluating the food sectors’ efforts to protect both employee and food safety, let’s see where we stand. According to CDC’s data tracker, 2022 started with the highest number of COVID-19 cases ever recorded in the pandemic in the U.S., reaching more than 5,000,000 cases per week. As of November 28, 2022, the weekly case count sits at just upward of 305,000, up slightly from an October 2022 low mark of 265,000, a number that hasn’t been seen since June 2020.

But, before the celebrations begin, it’s important to note the slight uptick in cases recently amid reports of new variants that appear to have increased vaccine immunity evasiveness. It should also be noted that a similar low point occurred in June 2021, when U.S. case counts dropped to as low as 82,000 per week, only to spike to more than a million per week by August 2021.

In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 hit the meat and poultry industry hard. Workers in close proximity to each other in poorly ventilated chilly rooms offered the perfect conditions in which the virus could thrive and spread. With absenteeism high, some companies actually incentivized workers with cash bonuses to continue working even if they were ill, a practice that was eventually stopped to prevent further spread of the disease. There were clear indications that these conditions contributed to community spread events in situations where workers often shared transportation and even lived together. According to CDC’s newsletter Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, among 23 states reporting COVID-19 outbreaks in meat and poultry processing facilities, 16,233 cases in 239 facilities occurred, including 86 (0.5%) COVID-19–related deaths.

Guidance for Industry

The World Health Organization (WHO) published an early guidance document that offered initial steps the food industry should take as the pandemic exploded. This was a general document that was not country specific, but at least offered industry a starting point.

This was quickly followed by a guidance issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on March 19, 2020, entitled “Guidance on the Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce: Ensuring Community and National Resilience in COVID-19,” in which workers in the food and agriculture sector—agricultural production, food processing, distribution, retail and food service, and allied industries—were named as essential critical infrastructure workers (see “CISA Worker Risk Assessments,” below).

The agency’s National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) risk management framework, which has been in place since 2014, identifies 16 industry sectors as essential, including the food and agriculture sector, which is composed of an estimated 2.1 million farms, 935,000 restaurants, and more than 200,000 registered food manufacturing, processing, and storage facilities, accounting for roughly one-fifth of the nation’s economic activity. There are four other sectors applicable for food: water and wastewater, energy, transportation, and chemicals (pesticides). NIPP outlines the mitigation options for each sector using a matrix.

OSHA Steps In

In food facilities, COVID-19 response preparation was often assigned to food safety teams, staff who had a keen understanding of risk management but little or no public health knowledge. Although guidance was finally available, many scrambled to find accurate information for protocol development in the heat of an outbreak. This resulted in information and awareness gaps and poorly designed procedures such as the early attendance incentives, and it left workers to manage active disease cases identified during the workday.

Commonly implemented interventions included employee temperature screening at points of entry, control measures (universal face coverings), engineering controls (physical barriers), and infection prevention measures (additional hand hygiene stations). Adequate social distancing proved to be a real challenge for food producers, resulting in continued high case counts in some facilities.

In May 2020, OSHA released a COVID-19 planning guidance document based on traditional infection prevention and industrial hygiene practices. They encouraged plan managers to stay abreast of guidance from federal, state, local, tribal, and/or territorial health agencies, and to consider how to incorporate those recommendations and resources into workplace-specific response plans.

These plans should consider and address the level(s) of risk associated with various worksites and job tasks workers perform at those sites. OSHA divided job tasks into four risk exposure levels: very high, high, medium, and lower risk. The agency’s Occupational Risk Pyramid shows the four exposure risk levels to represent probable distribution of risk, with “very high” and “high” at the top of the pyramid, including workers primarily found in the healthcare field and those who come into direct contact with infected patients. Most U.S. food workers likely fall in the “medium” exposure risk level due to the high population density found in food facilities.

The publication of the OSHA guidance completed the fundamental information necessary to develop a comprehensive plan for preparation and response to a pandemic; however, it should be noted that these are guidance documents and therefore do not represent required actions under law. In the chaos of the early days of the pandemic, many didn’t know where to access CISA or OSHA documents, so there may still be implementation gaps that should be addressed. Enforcement activities remain unlikely unless actual regulations are proposed.

What Will Winter 2023 Bring?

Evidence is emerging that the Northern Hemisphere is on course for a surge of cases this winter; the question is, how large will it be? Scientists believe new immune-evading strains of the Omicron variant, behavior changes, and waning immunity could result in more COVID-19 infections.

With newer and more contagious variants of the disease emerging, a new phase of the pandemic response is likely at hand. Although largely unchanged from the August 2020 version 4.0 release, the 4.1 version of the CISA guidance encourages industry to use its recommendations to update or develop a response plan to further reduce the frequency and severity of the virus’s impact in the event of another surge in cases.

Currently, more than 400,000 cases are reported globally every day, or roughly 2.8 million per week. This is not an insignificant number. Nine of 12 countries with the highest per capita case counts are in Europe, and the U.S. often follows, after a brief lag. These cases aren’t equally distributed, so a review of certain countries or regions provides the most accurate data to try to predict future spikes, although it still amounts to looking into a muddy crystal ball.

European Union data is the most worrisome at present. Increasing cases, along with shifting dominance in variants and subvariants, could be a prediction for the U.S. Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, was appointed to (then) President-elect Biden’s 13-member Transition COVID-19 advisory board. He reports an increase from 1.1 million cases per week in early September 2022 to 1.9 million cases per week in the four-week period from September through October 11, 2022, in the EU, as reported by WHO. The WHO/EU consists of 53 countries, 37 of which reported increasing cases; 14 reported rates increasing at greater than 20% over the prior two weeks.

According to data for this period, reviewed by Dr. Osterholm, Germany reported fewer than 30,000 cases per day, a number that increased to 105,000 cases per day, and was at or near hospital capacity, during this four-week period in the fall of 2022. France reported increases from 17,000 to 56,000 per day over the same period, and both countries reported that 80% to 90% of cases were attributed to the BA.5 variant. Austria reported 4,000 per day, increasing to 14,000 cases per day, with hospitalizations increasing from 1,100 to 2,400 during the same period. Italy’s cases doubled, from 20,000 to 40,000.

While most countries have shifted to a more sustainable mode of pandemic response measures, China continues to utilize a strict zero COVID-19 policy, including the use of complete lockdowns. This policy resulted in a two-month lockdown of Shanghai earlier this year and a more recent shutdown in Guangzhou that impacted 19 million people. Several protests began in late November, as people across China have grown weary of these severe measures.

Yum China, the Shanghai-based company that owns the KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell chains in China, re­ports the challenges resulting from the continued shutdowns. “In October, approximately 1,400 of our stores were either temporarily closed or offered only takeaway and delivery services,” the company said on November 1, 2022.

On the other end of the spectrum, Taiwan recorded relatively few COVID-19 cases until the highly infectious Omicron variant and its sub-variants began spreading in January 2022. Despite reporting more than 6.5 million infections since then, more than 99.5% of cases have been mild or asymptomatic, according to Taiwan’s health authorities. This may be due to the high level of vaccination uptake; four out of five people in the country have received the vaccine and at least one booster. Quarantine requirements have been lifted for inbound travelers, and pre-entry testing is no longer needed. Japan and Hong Kong have also relaxed COVID-19 border restrictions to boost struggling tourism.

In mid-August 2022, an effort called the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub laid out several scenarios for the U.S. over the upcoming months. After surges caused by the BA.5 Omicron variant, resulting in high levels of immunity in the population, the models suggest that the U.S. could be in for a relatively quiet season at the end of 2022, as long as vaccine booster campaigns are robust and new variants don’t emerge.

Even with a new variant, a big surge in U.S. cases isn’t certain. More than a month into fall, hospitalizations were declining slightly, in line with projections, says Justin Lessler, PhD, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who leads the modeling effort. But other factors on the horizon could spell trouble. As of November 28, U.S. cases and hospitalizations are ticking up in key areas.

Parts of North America are also seeing the rise of other Omicron sublineages. One such variant, BA.2.12.1, also has the capacity to evade antibodies triggered by a previous Omicron infection and vaccination, according to a study by virologist David Ho, MD, at Columbia University in New York City. The emergence of these strains suggests that the Omicron lineage is continuing to make gains by eroding immunity, says Dr. Ho. “It’s pretty clear that there are a few holes in Omicron that are gradually being filled up by these new subvariants.”

If SARS-CoV-2 continues along this path, its evolution could come to resemble that of other respiratory infections, such as influenza. In this scenario, immune-evading mutations in circulating variants, such as Omicron, could combine with dips in population-wide immunity to become the key drivers of periodic waves of infection.

Scientists say we could see more surprises from SARS-CoV-2. For instance, the Delta variant hasn’t completely vanished and, as global immunity to Omicron and its expanding family increases, a Delta descendant could mount a comeback. Whatever their source, new variants seem to emerge roughly every six months, and scientists wonder whether this is the structure that future COVID-19 outbreaks will settle into.

While we can’t predict the future with something as unpredictable as COVID-19, the virus is clearly not over yet. But we now have the experience and tools to develop response plans that can reduce or prevent large-scale outbreaks within food facilities. These plans will require maintenance and continued vigilance until the day comes that we can declare the pandemic finished—until the next one pops up.

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In the past decade, understanding and awareness of food allergens have only grown among consumers. Food allergies can be life threatening for allergenic individuals, as very small amounts of allergenic foods can cause severe allergic reactions. Gluten sensitivity, although different from other allergies, has also received a lot of attention in recent years. While reactions such as anaphylactic shock may not be caused by consuming gluten, the ingestion of gluten sources (wheat, rye, and barley) by a sensitive individual can result in detrimental health effects.

According to The University of Chicago Medicine Celiac Disease Center, one in 20 Americans is affected by celiac disease, which prevents people from being able to safely consume products containing gluten. Additionally, a 2020 study conducted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln estimated that 25% of American consumers willingly choose to follow a gluten-free diet. As with all food allergens, complete avoidance of gluten sources by sensitive individuals is the most effective preventive measure to avoid an adverse effect.

Allergic individuals rely on the ingredient information declared on the food label to prevent the intake of allergenic foods. Thus, an accurate declaration of ingredients by food processors is critical. In 2014, FDA released new regulations around gluten content, making it the only allergen in the U.S. to have a regulatory set amount—20 parts per millions (ppm)—that a product can contain and still be considered gluten-free. Allergen mislabeling is the No. 1 cause of food safety product recalls, which makes understanding regulations around allergens and having a thorough and robust allergen control program incredibly important for food processors. Controls implemented by the industry prevent a food from being contaminated, and the efficiency of those controls is verified through testing.

Here are four tips to help ensure that food producers are accurately and efficiently verifying the efficiency of their implemented allergen control measures to increase the delivery of safe food for consumers of all diets.

1. Identify the Right Gluten Testing Method

Selecting the right method comes down to risk and, as allergens are incredibly high risk for consumers, producers want to ensure they are using the most diligent test method for their needs. There are numerous methods available to test for allergens, but the four most common include general protein tests, lateral flow devices (LFDs), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) tests, and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) tests.

• General protein allergen tests. These are commonly used for testing for allergens in the food industry because they are easy to use and provide a quick time to result. These types of tests are qualitative and detect whether any protein is present after the cleaning process, including allergenic protein; however, these tests are not capable of indicating which specific allergen has been detected and are limited to testing on environmental surfaces only. There are a variety of commercially available general protein kits with different sensitivities; however, a highly sensitive method should be preferred for allergen cleaning verification.
• LFDs. Unlike a general protein test, immunoassay-based test methods such as LFDs can identify specific allergenic proteins. While still a highly commercially available qualitative protein test, this method requires producers to use LFDs customized to the allergen they are searching for, such as a gluten lateral flow. While they are not applicable to every food processor and situation, there has been an increase in guidelines looking for the protein-specific methods that LFDs can provide. This testing option is commonly used for cleaning verification because it is easy to use and provides a quick time to result. As an additional advancement compared to general protein tests, some LFD tests on the market have the capability to test a wide variety of sample types, such as raw material, first product off the line, environmental swabs, or clean-in-place rinse water.
• ELISA tests. This is another available protein and allergen-specific testing method that can provide a quantitative result informing producers how much of a specific allergen is present. This can be useful for cleaning validation as well as for food processors working with gluten-free products, because they are able to test how much gluten is present to meet gluten content regulatory levels; however, due to its ability to quantify results, this testing method requires more time, expertise, and equipment, making it a less viable option for daily verification. The ELISA method is beneficial for confirmation testing and pairs well with an initial qualitative test like an LFD, as well as cleaning validations. If food processors do not have the ability to bring this test method in house due to its complexity, they have the option of sending samples to a third-party laboratory to test when needed.
• ATP tests. These types of tests are commonly used for general cleaning verification but are sometimes used to trace present allergens; however, because ATP is easily removable from a surface (unlike proteins) and not all foods that have proteins contain ATP, these types of tests are not a best practice for producers wishing to conduct allergen testing, due to the fact that the allergenic protein could still be present on a surface even if it is free of ATP. Therefore, a protein-specific method is preferred for the safest and most accurate allergen testing programs.

2. Conduct a Method Feasibility Study

No matter which testing method is selected, it’s important to ensure that the method is fit for purpose, a step often overlooked but critical for ensuring proper test method selection. A method feasibility study allows producers to verify that the method they are wanting to use for allergen testing can indeed detect the allergen of concern within the products. When food proteins in a sample undergo food processing steps, such as heat processing or fermentation, the structure of the protein can change. When this happens, the testing method may be unable to detect the allergen proteins, especially immunoassays that rely on specific binding between an antibody and a certain region of a protein. If a method feasibility study has not been completed to verify that the test method is in fact detecting the protein, false negatives, mislabeling, and, potentially, product recalls may result, putting consumers in danger. As a result, conducting a method feasibility study can help protect the food processor and their brand, saving them time, money, and energy on product recalls by ensuring that the chosen test method can accurately detect the allergenic proteins.

3. Become Gluten-Free Certified

Another beneficial resource for manufacturers looking to build out safe and robust gluten-testing programs is the Gluten-Free Certification Organization (GFCO). This organization works with food manufacturers to help develop reliable testing options and cleaning processes. Additionally, consumers can look up products and brands that are GFCO certified (products that contain 10 ppm of gluten or lower, rather than FDA’s regulation of 20 ppm), and manufacturers can find certified testing options such as GFCO-certified gluten LFDs. Receiving this certification can help ensure that a food manufacturer is being as diligent as possible in its gluten allergen testing.

4. Provide Proper Gluten Testing Training

Lastly, and most importantly, any thorough testing program must include sufficient training of its technicians. To ensure proper safety and accurate results throughout the manufacturing process, the technicians performing the allergen tests must undergo proper training to make sure they feel comfortable and confident in running the selected test method. Prioritizing proper training will, in turn, help create a solid food safety culture that understands the risks of allergens.

As consumer awareness of allergens, specifically gluten, continues to increase, it will only become more important for food processors to ensure that they have an adequate allergen control program and are conducting adequate allergen cleaning procedures that are verified through allergen testing. A manufacturer’s thoroughness benefits consumers and provides cost savings by avoiding product recalls and fines that may result from mislabeled products.

By selecting the right protein-based allergen test method, conducting matrix verification, receiving GFCO certification, and providing proper training, food manufacturers can feel confident about delivering safe and reliable gluten-free products.

Lecy is the U.S. Technical Services Representative for Neogen Food Safety. Reach her at tlecy@neogen.com.

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The year 2022 has been a significant one for all things Salmonella related. With the recent USDA announcement classifying Salmonella as an adulterant in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products when exceeding 1 colony-forming unit (CFU) per gram, as well as the selection of a new Salmonella testing method of choice for USDA-Food Safety Inspection Service laboratories, there seems to be an increased interest from the poultry industry in how biomapping data can enhance statistics-based process control from flock to fork. The process of quantifying pathogens and microbial indicators, i.e., biomapping, has been described as an effective tool for process control, as it can highlight the effective interventions, provide a real-time status of the health of the process, and, ultimately, allow for risk-based decision making.

Despite many interventions over the past 20 years, the number of Salmonella incidences has not decreased significantly. This has been attributed to various factors but, when we look at available testing approaches, there are a few things to keep in mind, no matter what your method of choice is:

• Testing alone will never reduce the prevalence or quantity of Salmonella. The old saying that you cannot test your way to food safety remains true. A single test is unable to provide a full view of the information needed to identify points of concern within the production process. Furthermore, the testing data must be analyzed within the context of process metadata.
• Your method of choice must accompany a statistically valid sampling plan. This is the only way to ensure that your statistical process control programs are working properly.
• Don’t run microbiology tests if you don’t have a plan for the data. Otherwise, you’re wasting time and money. Data produced from tests help you understand gaps in your process and enable decision making about what tools are needed to address concerns.

Biomapping helps processors monitor the efficacy of antimicrobial interventions by sampling at critical control points (CCPs) where contamination levels can be assessed. When implemented accurately, biomapping can help to:

1. Improve processors’ understanding of the antimicrobial interventions efficacy;
2. Provide a holistic view of the process while providing deeper insights through monitoring CCPs; and
3. Ultimately, improve the microbiological quality of processors’ products through better process controls.

Biomapping of CCPs allows for continuous improvements including improved risk assessments of the overall production process. If you don’t have a biomapping element in your testing process, you can incorporate one into existing protocols by identifying CCPs where contamination challenges are evident by existing microbial indicator data.

Quantification

Biomapping via quantification of non-pathogenic microbes has long been a way to perform sanitation verification or biomapping. More recently, though, the tools for quantification have evolved from the use of indicator organisms to a more specific Salmonella quantification, and the quantification technology has evolved to more precise quantitative (q) PCR. As it stands today, this combination of indicator and Salmonella quantification remains the most potent way to understand the microbial makeup and load of the process. Also, with the availability of the qPCR technology, this trend of specific pathogen quantification is likely going to intensify via better use of data, and a potential expansion to include other pathogens of interest.

As is the case in our technology-driven world, however, all methods are not created equal, and technology advancements happen faster than we can keep up with them. Existing microbial quantification options have their drawbacks: Direct counting (optical microscopy) has a limited application, most probable number (MPN) is cumbersome and expensive, and direct plating does not offer a high certainty that a contaminant is Salmonella and therefore requires confirmation. The emergence of qPCR technologies, with or without enrichment, can correlate inversely with target DNA fragments, allowing for a validation on a per matrix basis (i.e., carcass versus parts versus ground) and decision making in a time bound manner. While biomapping remains a viable means of process improvement, the end will, and should, remain with how we leverage the data for improving our processes.

As someone with a passion for translating science into action, it is my deep belief that data enable us to make superior decisions and to raise the bar for food safety across industries. The democratization of technology should allow for easy and pertinent data collection. The focus now passes to how we use these data. It will be interesting to see where the collective industry goes from here and what the future holds for food safety and, ultimately, global food security.

Dr. Dutta is senior director, scientific affairs, for bioMérieux. Reach him at vikrant.dutta@biomerieux.com.

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