This will be my first post, other than an introduction, so if I commit a Food Safety Forum Sin please have mercy! I'll start by saying that I'm the Quality Manager, SQF Practitioner, and PCQI for what most would consider a small business. Our SQF certification is still in it's infancy in it's fifth year, but we did score our first Excellent last month. You could say I am new to Quality as well, and our department is small but growing. I have one tech, my backup practitioner, who has been with the company longer than I but is like, brand-spanking-new to quality even more than myself.
We produce peanuts, tree nuts and confections; all of which are packaged in various sized tins, as well as various sized pouch bags. The tins receive an oxygen scrubber before being seamed and have been through an extensive internal, as well as an independent external university shelf-life study. Aside from the confections, obviously nuts have very low water activity and the shelf-life examination and testing was heavily focused on quality and organoleptic characteristics.
The pouch bags on the other hand receive no o2 scrubbers, the reason being our CEO feels that they reduce the headspace in the bag TOO much, making them look more "vacuum-sealed", and feels they do not stand up as nicely on the shelves in our retail outlets. (Although most of our sales are web, wholesale and fundraising, and private label.) So we've been toying with a nitrogen-flush for that packaging line over the last year, as sales for this form of packaging have increased and we believe they will continue that trajectory. Currently, without any form of MAP at all, they have a shelf-life of Best Before: 90 days (or less, depending on the seasoning/lack-of) before quality characteristics begin to wane. Note: none of our products have an actual Expiration Date.
So, in a very short whirlwind of a week-or-so, while preparing for an Unannounced SQF Audit and throughout it; this happened. When I say "this happened", I mean literally all of a sudden we have a Nitrogen Flush, tanks, a new supplier, and we are doing this. Like, hey by the way we're Nitrogen flushing now so set up some meetings to figure out what we need to do from here.
So this is where I'm at. Starting from scratch. SQF is so vague when it comes to compressed air and gasses. Is it clean? Yes. Okay.
So far, I've added the supplier to our Approved Supplier Program once they submitted the requested docs, I'm working on getting our procedures updated to allow for O2 testing the headspace to collect data for trending, I have 12 pouches of each size to open one a month with the team for reviewing quality traits, and I know this needs to go in the Food Safety Plans... but I feel like I'm missing a lot here. It feels more complicated than this. Has anyone been in my shoes? Am I missing some glaringly obvious no-no? Or does this just feel so intense because all of this should have been vetted before it happened? No claims have been made, or changed, in regards to shelf-life being any shorter. Am I being overdramatic here?
Answered
