Steam treatment for infestation of raw material fruit
Recently, I was talking about weirdest things that can happen in fruit warehouse of growers. We were discussing about the prunes which get picked up from the field , go through 18-24 hrs of dehydration in high temperature and then stored in the warehouse to be sold to food companies. Someone told me of incidents where rat was found,a dried half of a snake, pieces of lizard, insects fragments, or even a dead bat could occur in direct contact to the prunes. I am not sure if those products were completely destroyed or partly but I am curious to know, what is the right thing to do in that case supposing the warehouse has a good pest control program and the incidents are outlier. I believe the right thing to do would be segregate the product and destroy them.
Coming from the prunes processing industry, where we receive dried prunes from growers which are then steam re-hydrated at 212 degree C for 20 min, pitted and packed, I wanted to know what is the degree of risk in receiving such infested prunes without our knowledge. What are the chances that the rat or bat had rabies and the snake had its poison transferred on the fruit. Would the steam treatment be sufficient to solve those kind of problems.
Our company has a supplier approval program in place and we receive fruit from approved suppliers only. We have raw material control program where every batch we receive is inspected. However, I am curious what if such incident has happened without our knowledge and never been reported to us..
Having a supplier approval program is an important element to sort out such kind of situations.
Furthermore it needs to be followed up. The program needs to include (without being exhaustive) supplier audits, certification schema requirements and questionnaires.
In case of strong doubts of a supplier, you need to visit (audit) them to clarify such things. In the audit, you need to include the pest prevention program.
I hope that you have more information now, on how you could act.
Kind regards,
Gerard Heerkens
Thank you for your suggestions Gerard.
You're welcome! Hope it helps.
I was thinking further and it will also be an option to include some of the mentioned issues in your Foreign body prevention program. And, of course, to intensively audit this t
You're welcome! Hope it helps.
I was thinking further and it will also be an option to include some of the mentioned issues in your Foreign body prevention program. And, of course, to audit this topic intensively during your supplier audits.
Have a nice evening!
Kind regards,
Gerard H.