Dear All,
I am working in a Hotel. We are implementing HACCP in our hotel.
My question is, when we are deciding the critical limits like Cooking temperature, reheat temperature, food storage temperature, what reference do we need to give?
For Example:
1. When we say the minimum cooking temperature is 75 deg cent, do we need to validate that the food cooked at 75 deg cent is safe for consumption.
2. When we store the food at 5 deg cent or below we give 3 days’ shelf life to food, do we need to validate or prove it? If yes how?
Every hotel uses the same critical limits globally, but how do we prove that our system is right?
Regards
Deepti Rai
Hi Deepti,
Let me try to answer your questions: -
1. When we say the minimum cooking temperature is 75 deg cent, do we need to validate that the food cooked at 75 deg cent is safe for consumption.
Yes you need to validate but what. There are enough reliable data / literature available to prove that core temperature min 75 deg c is sufficient to ensure food safety but there is always minimum time limit attached to it. Setting this minimum cooking time would be the validation in your case. At the end of the exercise you might say that 75 Deg C for minimum 30 secs is adeqquate to ensure food safety.
This validation data is proved with the help of microbial analysis to shoe that time-temp combination selcted is enough to bring the mocrobes to safe lelevl. No pathogens present and TPC within a limit.
Based on this data you would design the cooking process; so that cooking is long enough to ensure 75 Deg C for the minimum time decided in your validation.
2. When we store the food at 5 deg cent or below we give 3 days’ shelf life to food, do we need to validate or prove it? If yes how?
Yes; this would also require validation. If you see a shelf life of three days - You can design your study as follows: -
Microbial and organoleptic analysis every 8 hours for first 48 hours and then may be at every 4 hours. Depending upon teh results yo may further fine tune the schedule.
At the end of study you might come up with the groups of products - out of then some have a shelf of 36hrs, some have 48 hrs, some 60 hrs etc. Even this difference in shelf lives is important in your kind of round the clock operation where guest is served fresh food.
Thanks
Regards
Gourav