Potential risks of repacking cheese in ambient
We are SQF certified and looking to do repacking for cheese in ambient temperature. We have a small cold for storage and shipping, Only the repacking would be done in ambient?. Is there any potential risk or how can I support it if we are looking to pack in ambient?
Hi,
You should look at your product and view what potential risks are there.
I am assuming that your ambiant packaging location is already of a suitable hygienic design (clean, no dust, maintained).
Then it is the question what kind of risks am I mitigating with my cold storage? Is it for microbiological shelf life, sensorische or for more commercial reasons (e.g. consumers think the product is of higher quality when bought from the fridge than ambiant, thus it is kept cooled).
A hard gouda style cheese may not need to be kept in cold supply chain for its shelf life. A soft cheese is more likely to need a cold supply chain.
If the product should be kept cooled than you could see which risks ambiant storage could bring.
How long is the product in the ambiant room and what will the effect on product temperature be? If packging only takes a short time you could look to validate the proces (take into account hot summer weather!). and decide which procedures you want to put into place. So if packaging also takes 30 minutes from taking it out of cold storage, packaging and putting it back in cold storage. It will likely not impact your core temperature that much.
Keep in mind if you are willing to take the risk of having the product heat up when procedure is not followed.
I would think for hard cheeses your risk should be fairly low assuming product is moved out of and back into cold storage as quickly as possible
Soft cheeses will have a much smaller window
What exactly do you mean by repacking? Your biggest risk would be the introduction of foreign yeast and mold spores that could shorten shelf life
I worked in a cheese packing house a long time ago and the packing floor was kept at 10C and the cheese never got that warm, but they were high speed packing lines, not manual
We co-pack the cheese into small pouches. Our cold room is set to be around 38F, and the packing room is in ambient temperature. We work with grated cheese. I am trying to understand the risk associated in copacking of cheese in ambient temperature and setting up a time limit for the production. The product are packed in a filler machine which usually does around 45 packs per minute.
You risk it not working
Are you adding cellulose to the cheese? Equipment is going to be warm, your cheese will soften and stick and now you've made waste not finished goods
I don't see the working, period
We had a line packing 45 5kg bags a minute at 10C with cheese being 2-4C.............I genuinely do not see this going well. That cheese will warm so quickly
Can you add cooling to that room?