Identifying worms inside fruits and vegetables salad
Hi all,
We have been receiving complaints of worms in the fruits and vegetables salad that are served raw. To give you a background of what steps we follow to ensure we don't get any worms or insects complaints in salads:
1. We buy fruits and vegetables from approved vendors
2. We sanitize them with chlorine tablets solution; salt water and chilled water if the variants are of high risk.
3. While cutting, we check the internals of the fruits and vegetables to see if any infestation is there but the signs are not shown externally.
Only then we proceed to prepare the salad.
Now, the worms that are not seen in the salad ingredients while preparing, are seen to be crawling out by the time the salads reach customers. I is creating an extremely bad impression about our company.
Before posting here, I tried searching if there are any means of identifying the internal infestation without cutting them. But I got no hits. If there are any means, kindly share here. It would be extremely helpful for me.
Hi all,
We have been receiving complaints of worms in the fruits and vegetables salad that are served raw. To give you a background of what steps we follow to ensure we don't get any worms or insects complaints in salads:
1. We buy fruits and vegetables from approved vendors
2. We sanitize them with chlorine tablets solution; salt water and chilled water if the variants are of high risk.
3. While cutting, we check the internals of the fruits and vegetables to see if any infestation is there but the signs are not shown externally.
Only then we proceed to prepare the salad.
Now, the worms that are not seen in the salad ingredients while preparing, are seen to be crawling out by the time the salads reach customers. I is creating an extremely bad impression about our company.
Before posting here, I tried searching if there are any means of identifying the internal infestation without cutting them. But I got no hits. If there are any means, kindly share here. It would be extremely helpful for me.
Hi Shwethahanka,
What is the shelf life of your product? Do you keep your products below 5°C during the storage?
I need to know are your suppliers stores the supplied fruits at lower temperatures?
There is high chance of growth of worms by the ingredients as they are dried and may contains the eggs of flies and when gets the appropriate temperature they start hatching.
Kind regards
Inam
Auckland - New Zealand
Hi Shwethahanka,
What is the shelf life of your product? Do you keep your products below 5°C during the storage?
I need to know are your suppliers stores the supplied fruits at lower temperatures?
There is high chance of growth of worms by the ingredients as they are dried and may contains the eggs of flies and when gets the appropriate temperature they start hatching.
Kind regards
Inam
Auckland - New Zealand
Hi Inam,
Thank you for responding.
The salads that we prepare in-house are having shelf-life of only 12 hours and outsourced are having 24 hours shelf-life. However, immediately after preparation, both in-house and outsourced salads are stored in chillers. The outsourced salads are delivered to us in reefer vehicles and we immediately store them again in chillers.
Only during delivery to the customer the salads are subjected to ambient temperature, but not for more than 20 minutes.
Hi Shwethahanka,
Please put in your consideration that most of fruits and vegetables could have an insect phase like egg which can turn to worm or Larva during the period from harvest until reach to the customer, especially if you kept raw vegetables and /or producing salad at room temperature
On the other, some of insect "like fruit fly" need to store at temperature 1.1°C / 12 days to kill all insect phases
Best Regards,
Medhat
Cairo - Egypt
Hi Shwethahanka.
as we also phase the same complaint before, after that we kept cut vegetables in 500g salt mixed with 500g vinegar in 60 liter cold water and agitate slowly.i think it will be helpful to you.
regards
muhammed rafi
If you could post a picture, people could hazard a guess.
Hi Shwethahanka,
Since you have control in place and have short shelf life, looks like that the supplier approval required, what control your supplier has put to control the fruit flies?
see the article on fruit fly from Victoria govt Australia http://agriculture.v...t-fly/gardeners
Also, i can suggest do some observation and for test purpose store the individual fruit (not mix salad) and see what is notorious fruit most of the time results in work grown; accordingly put that fruit / supplier in risk list and slowly refine your exercise and put controls and review the results.
Kind regards
Inam