Frequency of Testing for ISO 22000 tea company

Hello! 

I would appreciate information on the customary frequency of laboratory testing for a food company with ISO 22000, specifically tea. We have dry, stable raw ingredients that undergo strict testing before purchase. How often should we be sending samples of product to the microbiology lab? 

The ISO 22000 regulation does not specify the frequency of this testing, only that it be done.

Thank you very much

I haven't really dealt with ISO 22000 in that regard but as long as it doesn't directly specify and as it would seem you are in a low risk food I'd say you could do it monthly with a small sample or maybe even quarterly.  If you do it quarterly and the inspector doesn't like it at most you'll get a minor (so long as your not violating any laws) and you can change it to monthly.  The justification can be that it's a low risk (dry) food product with a low water activity so biological risk should be low unless your looking at things like at my flour mill with (vomatoxin) or the like.

How many lines do you run?  In pasta, not ISO 22000 certified, we used to send one sample per line and a few other choice cuts that didn't come up often monthly in addition to the semolina we would send a certain amount of samples of that as well.  There we were looking for vomatoxin and other flour specific issues.

We never had a problem with anything we sent as far as I remember.

Thank you for your advice. I am still looking for ISO 22000 TEA - can anyone out there assist?

Dear eschorr,

Which para. of iso22000 are you referring ?

The generic answer depends on what the objective of yr sampling / analysis actually is. This may relate to the above query. It may also relate to the context, eg known variability of yr target parameters, volumes involved.

I daresay yr purchase specification utilizes a nmMc type format for certain micro.parameters.

If so support for lot compliance to specifications minimally involves sampling as per yr specification. As an example can refer to the list of EU microbiological specs  for foods. Such a method has well-known limitations but still remains a standard procedure for logistical reasons, inter alia.

Alternatively could use a MIL STD type approach in a variables type format but not so meaningful for zero-tolerant items where the c=0 style is more useful.

Alternatively could be simply ad hoc, sort of like previous suggestion.

In-house facilities tend to do it day-by-day or week-by-week as required. So closer control is theoretically possible. However micro.analysis is slowwwww. Some pathogens can easily take up to a week if using traditional methods.

ISO probably don’t care how you do it  (it's a generic standard :smile: ) as long as you can VALIDATE what you are doing. Unless the relevant  iso22000 para. (??) restricts the options ?

Rgds / Charles.C