4 replies to this topic

[Bakerkid]

Question,   Can someone point me to regulations that would cover the topic of Delivery Trucks and open bread products being packed and staged for that day's deliveries in the same area.  Once the Trucks Start and the door are open to the outside I have no control of the environment.  Most of the product is packaged in plastic bags at that point,  but there are some open product and some product cooling on racks.  This area also doubles as the packing area with the trucks parked inside and the door closed during the packing shift.

[SQFconsultant]

I've seen this in older bakeries, inner city areas mostly where the route trucks pull directly into the facility and each one changed in order to get certified. It's a big cross-contamination issue waiting to happen (if it already hasn't happened.)

[GMO]

I used to work in a very small bakery in the UK and this never happened (despite lots of other bad stuff which did happen).  We had a dock which the lorry would pull on to and the bread racks of wrapped products were wheeled out to it.

[SQFconsultant]

The throwback to an earlier more innocent time in the NJ NYC area had mostly Italian bread bakeries such as Goranello and Sanitary bakery actually dropping off paper sacks of fresh bread right onto the sidewalk or entry way to their customers and beleive it or not it was only last year that I was in a bakery in Brooklyn, New York where not only the route trucks would pull directly into production but also tractor trailers drove into the building and unloaded directly into the warehouse.

That changed only this past March and it took major pushing for the extended family operation to change it as there thought was "nothing bad has ever happened in the past 100 years, why should we change now."

Growing up in the 60's and being in the restaurant business it was routine for those sacks of bread to be dropped by the side receiving door and they would sit there for at least a couple of hours until we came in that morning to prep up for the day.

To a certain extent I agree with the older family operation - but the reality is that things happen unintentionally and can create havoc, get people sick and potentially kill them.

This point was proven when I was a chef - little did we know at the time that a compamy we bought ground meat from had mixed an older batch with a newer batch... 10 people became sick, 2 of them seriously and 1 child almost died.

That was when back in the 70's when we blindly accepted food from our suppliers and began one of the first food safety programs in the restaurant industry.

There are still bakeries out there in NYC, NJ, Detroit, Los Angeles and others that allow trucks directly into production - change is slow until you make someone ill or kill someone.

[GMO]

There's an old fashioned bakery who sell product in my town.  They come on traditional plastic bread trays which have holes in them, unwrapped and are put on the stall.  So far so bad as this bread can be out all day.  The real shocker though is as I'm a runner, I often see them setting up on the day of the market and see them putting the baskets directly on the pavement then take that basket and put it on top of another.  No idea how they get away with it.  Presumably the environmental health officer (who has jurisdiction over this kind of thing) has never seen it.

 

In one company I worked in, we had a major food safety issue which almost closed the business.  This was in a very old company with 115 year history.  History is good but it doesn't mean it will never happen.  Immune systems have changed in the last 100 years and so have expectations.  Just because they distributed their stock via horse and cart when they started, doesn't mean they do that now.  As you know more you do better.  "We've never made anyone ill before" is not a robust defence in law.