Ready to eat and non ready to eat product testing
Hi
I work in central production. soup bases and curry bases are cooked here and then they will be sent to the restaurants. In restaurants, they bring it to boil and add the cooked meat to them and serve it for cutomer. but when we produce them they do not have any meat. for example saag curry has all vegeterian ingredients except meat!
Soup bases has the base of soup but without any meat or noodle!
Are these soup base and curry bases RTE or nonRTE? Is it needed to put them in sampling plan for RTE foods?
Greeetings,
As RTE food is food that will not be cooked or reheated before serving, then in your case were the restaurants do that your product is non-RTE. However to make it more robust I would suggest you mention this on your label/product specifications etc as an instruction to reheat or boil before serving if you haven't already, so as to avoid being called "misinformative" in case someone opts for cold consuption for reasons unknown!
Regards!
because the definition of RTE is not so easy just to find out by reheating or non reheating, as you can see in the decision tree I doubt.
By stating that all your clients/restaurants do the reheating/boiling I stopped in the second to last question, taking for granted that there is no doubt anyone will not perform this action, hence non-RTE. However, if you think it is indeed ambiguous you continue on and you end up with RTE with labelling instructions for reheating for extra safety and/or quality purposes. The difference is in the "must" and "should".
I guess if it is ambiguous (and since your product is already cooked) the reheating is for quality reasons and not so much for safety, so it should be reheated for better result and for the added safety layer (?).
Hi Evans
It is reheated for quality in the restaurants not for safety reason
But I think because of safety reason also it is necessary to reheat them, because maybe listeria grow inside them when they are kept in fridge.
Since the product is safe up to the point of arrival at your customers (and to extend it more up to its shelf-life if stored correctly, especially pathogen wise assuming you do listeria checks etc on your part), and your clients don't do something extraordinarily unsafe there won't be any problems with listeria. And if by some chance they do have problems with listeria a reheat will not propably save the day and they will have bigger issues with listeria being so easy to spread and forming biofilms on many things.
Thanks Evans
Hi Persian Girl,
As well the comments previous posters have made regarding storage/handling/reheating/cooking instructions I believe that it is important to know if the products are ambient stable or refrigerated/perishable soups/sauces? If they are perishable then I would treat them as RTE in my product sampling but perhaps with more focus on toxin producers rather than pathogens killed by a cooking/reheating process.
Kind regards,
Tony