Validating Fish Allergen Sanitation based on other Allergen validation
The company I work for makes RTE jerky products. We are BRC certified and just had our audit last month. We deal with soy and wheat as allergens and have them both validated by using Neogen swab kits. However, we have a customer that wants to use fish sauce in a new recipe. Fish is obviously much more difficult to test for as there are no (to my knowledge) test kits available.
My question is this: Can we validate our sanitation for fish allergens based on our validation for soy and wheat? Our SOP's and SSOP's are the same regardless of the allergens.
Thank you.
I would still ensure the current SOPs and SSOPs are sufficient for removing the fish allergen. There are some fish allergen kits around, otherwise you can send to an external lab. I believe Romer labs has a fish test kit. Eurofins is an external lab that does allergen testing.
The Neogen swab kit is only a qualitative verification; an ELISA test on the finished product would give you a quantitative value in ppm; however, you could run some tests and send equipment surface swabs and finished product to an external lab.
You would need the associated materials for those PCR tests:
- BioKits DNA Extraction Kit (Speciation; Cat No. 901040N)
- Hot Start Taq DNA Polymerase
- 0.2 mL (thin-walled) PCR tubes, 0.5 mL or 1.5 mL Eppendorf-type tubes
- PCR machine, preferably with heated-lid facility and ramping at 4°C/sec
- Microlitre-type pipettes (sizes 10, 20, 200, 1000 µL) and disposable filter tips
- Vortex mixer
- Ethidium bromide solution, to be used at a final concentration of 0.5 µg/mL
- Agarose gel suitable for analysis of DNA fragments <1 kb
- 0.5 x Tris-borate EDTA (TBE) buffer
Potentially another thing you could do is test the histamine levels in the fish oil and then use the Reveal 3D swab for histamine (single step lateral flow assay) or the veratox/alert for histamine (ELISA method; much longer but more quantitative).
OR you could switch to vegan and eliminate the hazard altogether!
"When flavor-boosting nucleotides are paired with glutamates, the perception of umami is significantly increased. Sure enough, a salty broth made with dried shiitake mushrooms (rich in nucleotides) and soy sauce (glutamates) provided just the right meaty punch as a 1:1 substitute for fish sauce.
Here’s how to make it: In a saucepan, simmer 3 cups of water, ¼ ounce of dried sliced shiitake mushrooms, 3 tablespoons of salt, and 2 tablespoons of soy sauce over medium heat until reduced by half. Strain, cool, and store in the fridge for up to three weeks."
Chances are the shitake is a lot cheaper than sardines these days too
Claimed to be applicable to fish allergens and seemingly not PCR.
http://www.tecnalab....ning-plan-229-2