Verifying Allergen Clean after HPP

Hello Food Safety Professional!

This is regarding High Pressure Processing (HPP), I was wondering if someone can provide me insight of verifying allergen clean. In our company there is no open product or manufacturing of any food. We strictly have a machine that only HPP items such meats, juices, and hummus. My question is, since some of our product consider or identify as an allergen such as coconut water for example, do we perform an allergen swab after we CIP? Is this step necessary? Since we're also SQF, verifying and validating is an important matter. If anyone can advise, this would be great to establish whether to implement or omit this step.

Thank you much!

It depends on your equipment. If your HPP uses exposed/open products where it contacts the actual foods, then yes you want to do some verification swabs to ensure allergens are cleaned out. If the equipment never contacts the product (e.g. if it puts sealed flexible packaging under pressure), then you don't need to allergen swab it any more than you would allergen swab a cardboard box you loaded the product into.

Coconut is in a weird category, and I'm not sure if the test would be appropriate or not. Perhaps a protein removal validation such as atp would be a good option to help validate. You certainly don't need to do it every time you clean, come up with a verification schedule and don't release products that are affected by your swabs until they come back clean.

Thank you for your reply.

The HPP does not have any exposed or open product in it. Every product comes in packaged from the customer. Thank you again, this definitely help in scheduling the verification.

Glad to hear. You also want to make sure you have a clearly outlined corrective action in the event one of your supplier/customer's products leaks in your chamber to ensure you don't contaminate the outer packaging of other products. But I imagine that's a whole thing for you already.

Yes, we already have a corrective action in place if contamination occurs in the chamber. The operator is well trained to spot any damages/leaks and must report to QA when it is discovered.

Dear all,

I agree what was mentioned before. As I understad you are applying HPP as service for food manufactures.

Two possibilities to contaminate your equiment

- breackages of packages containing allergenic food

- package will be delivered to you with contamination of the outer surface

To avoid contamination of machines you could place products e.g. on slips, plactic films or in boxes.

Rgds

moskito