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[TFMBen]

As I mentioned before, I work for a small start-up company that manufactures flavored vegetarian meat substitutes.We would like to get BRC certification for a potential customer. I was given the job of figuring out the feasibility of our small company getting BRC, although I have no prior experience in quality assurance. Sorry if my questions are basic and dumb. Our products are refrigerated or frozen and just require warming (not cooking), so our products are high risk and would require a high risk zone. The problem is that we work out of a commercial kitchen that  we adapted for our needs. Everything is done in one room,from  mixing raw ingredients, cooking, slicing, and packing. According to 4.3.6 a high risk zone needs to be physically separate. Does that mean all high risk tasks i.e. all processing after cooking needs to be physically separate from the low risk tasks? If so that's impossible in our current production facility, it's just too small. Is it impossible to get BRC in our current situation? Or I am misunderstanding 4.3.6 and I can treat the whole room as a high risk zone?

 

Thanks for you help. 

[Charles.C]

Dear TMFBen,

 

It sounds improbable.

 

I presume by "cooking" you mean RTE product output.

 

The logic for separation  is that heightened sanitary controls are implemented in a high risk zone in view of the product's cooked status. This demands some kind of physical barrier to separate various functions.

 

As an example, many factories use  steam based "hood-ovens" which surround a conveyor belt. The raw input is typically in a low risk area but the output is in a high risk zone and directly fed into a freezer, ie the oven constitutes an interface between high/low risk. It is then necessary to construct a separation, eg a wall, across the oven and partitioning  the input/output. And incidentally also enabling separation of the respective high/low personnel / equipment etc.

 

Whether your situation is adaptable, eg with prefabricated walls,  depends on the geometry / process flow etc.

 

Rgds / Charles.C