Seeking help allergen validation poultry plant

Hi guys, I am trying to establish an cleaning and sanitation allergen validation study, working at a poultry processing plants that does hot dogs, chicken patties. fried drum stick, nuggets etc,the problem is that we have 9 allergens used including the big 8 and sulfites. Can we use a general protein swab for validation study instead of using specific test kit? Or do we have to go by each kind of allergen. 

Hello, 

I work in a poultry plant as well, and we have in place an Allergen program that includes:

Production schedule planning, from Non Allergen Containing Products to Most Allergen Containing Products

Cleaning Verification with specific allergen swabs. we swab at the beginning of the study 10 consecutive production days (after cleaning machinery used to produce with an specific allergen) if everything comes back negative, then we document a assessment  to decrease to 5 consecutive samples if everything comes back negative, we decrease to once a month. we also send take swabs to send to an external laboratory with one control sample (know that is positive) at this point we are sending to the lab for validation every quarter and we verify cleaning effectiveness monthly.

I hope it helps.

Regards,

What's the detection limit on the protein swab?

If you're looking at the big 8 as mentioned, protein won't be sufficient from a label verification standpoint.........what I mean is you won't know which allergen(s) is still present and therefore won't be able to figure out what steps need to be taken to rectifiy the situation

Segregation during processing and swabbing for each allergen would be my recommendation particularly for validation.............once you've validated your process, then maybe, but definitely not just protein swabs for validation