FOOD SAFETY SURVEILLANCE
By Kevin J. Freeborn
Friday, February 6, 2009 
The enemy surrounds you – they attack more than eight million Canadians each year. You can’t see, hear, smell or taste them as they are invisible to your senses.
So how do you defend against them?
You need to establish surveillance and detection procedures to prevent, eliminate or reduce the enemy contaminants to safe levels. In short, you need to monitor your critical control points.
WHAT TO MONITOR
This is where HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points) principles start to pay off. Without HACCP, you would be monitoring everything and still might miss what’s critical. With a HACCP plan, CCPs (critical control points) are the points in food preparation where you focus your monitoring activities. For example, a CCP for chicken supreme is at the cooking step and the critical limit is 85 C or 185 F for 15 seconds. You need to be sure you monitor the temperature for the appropriate duration before the chicken is served to ensure it reaches the critical limit set for that CCP. Monitoring is critical to preventing food borne illness, which is the reason for developing your HACCP plan.
HOW TO MONITOR
Factors affecting how to monitor are dependant on the critical limit set for a CCP. These factors include what methods your operation has available to monitor, an acceptable cost for the monitoring and reasonable time for carrying out the monitoring.
There are many ways to monitor food as it flows through your establishment from receiving to consumption. These include sensory monitoring, such as visual (looking for contaminants like glass), smell (checking the smell of milk to determine if it is sour) and touch (gently feeling fruit to determine its ripeness). Of course, some of these observational methods are subjective, leaving room for error. So, if there is any doubt, throw it out.
Being able to measure critical limits using equipment designed for that purpose eliminates some of the potential error that exists in observational or sensory monitoring. In processing environments, testing of pH (acidity levels) or Aw (water available to bacterial growth) is often done but in most restaurants, measuring time and temperature are the most common methods of monitoring.
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"...I have seen many cooks check the 'doneness' of chicken by sticking a fork in it to see if juices run clear." |
So how do you decide which method is appropriate?
Review the critical limit. If it is based on a temperature or time requirement, use a thermometer or clock to monitor. While this may seem obvious, I have seen many cooks check the “doneness” of chicken by sticking a fork in it to see if juices run clear. This is an example of observational monitoring, which is prone to error; the juice may appear clear but the temperature might not be high enough to kill hazardous bacteria. In this example, the only way to be sure is to monitor with a thermometer.
Let’s take this scenario a step further. Imagine this chicken will be delivered to a meeting room where your business clientele will eat it at their leisure. As you know from your HACCP plan, hot-holding is a critical control point; however, you are unable to check the temperature during this closed door meeting.
The solution: Assume the worst (that the chicken is not being held at the right temperature). Then, use time as a method of monitoring.
Chicken being held needs four hours to allow bacteria to grow to dangerous levels. To be on the safe side, you can remove the food after two hours and time (two hours or less) becomes your method of monitoring.
Monitoring equipment is only helpful if it is clean, sanitized, working and properly calibrated. If you don’t clean and sanitize your thermometer between uses, you can actually cross-contaminate other foods. Check the calibration of your thermometers frequently. It’s recommended you do so at the beginning of each shift.
MONITORING FREQUENCY
Monitoring could become a daunting task if you had to check every item of food leaving the kitchen. Fortunately, that is not the case.
For example, if you work in a fast-food operation as a short order cook, you don’t have to check each hamburger prepared. Instead, before service heat up the grill and prepare hamburgers (as usual). Then, check a couple from the first few batches to ensure you are getting the right results (meeting or exceeding your critical limit). Halfway through the meal period, check a couple more burgers to see if the equipment is recovering between batches, so that the critical limits are still being met.
Let’s examine another example: Preparing prime rib roasts for a large banquet. You can check the internal temperature of the largest roast coming out of the oven – the rest will be at the same temperature or higher as long as they were all thawed and put in the oven together. This way you don’t have to check every roast for temperature.
The point is to monitor a representative batch of the food you are preparing. Monitoring needs to be built into the process – scheduled for each batch of food at the critical control points identified in your HACCP plan.
WHO DOES THE MONITORING?
Monitoring needs to done at the critical control point. This means you may have several critical control points happening simultaneously. For example, the prep staff could be making tuna salad while the cook is pulling a turkey from the oven and the serving team is checking the temperature on your steam table. Because the chef or manager can’t be everywhere at once, monitoring is something that needs to be done by many (maybe all) members of your team.
To ensure monitoring is completed correctly, train your team. This means they require food safety knowledge and the skills to take measurements properly. A great way to start is by providing the training your team requires.
Kevin J. Freeborn of Freeborn & Associates is an internationally renowned, award-winning consultant, author and speaker with 30 years of food service experience. He has been retained by North America’s leading organizations to develop food safety programs and training. Contact him at 1.888.829.3177.
