Allergen Testing Annual Cost Research

Hello everyone,

I am currently conducting research as part of my Master's degree, focusing on the cost of food testing in the industry, with a particular emphasis on allergen testing.

As part of my study, I am seeking input from a wide range of food businesses across the globe to gain insight into the financial impact of allergen monitoring.

If you're involved in a food business, I would be extremely grateful if you could share the following information:

1. Annual cost your business incurs specifically for allergen testing (in your local currency).

2. An estimate of what percentage of your net profit is invested in allergen monitoring and testing.

3. Your business category (e.g. manufacturer, retailer, food service, supplier, etc.).

4. A brief description of the type of products your business produces or sells.

All responses will be anonymized and used solely for academic research purposes. The goal of this project is to help improve understanding of the economic burden and variability of allergen control across the food industry.

Thank you in advance for your time and valuable input.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or would like to learn more about the study.

I see you're not including the cost of NOT testing for allergens

What is your thesis statement?

Generally speaking, the cost of allergen testing is nominal, particularly when you relate that back to net profit

I'll give you an example--when processing spent hens, you need to test for egg allergen, let's say the swabs are $4 each, and I use 3, $12 total

Now, that $12 as a percent of net profit on that lot of birds-who let's assume is a full load or 18000 birds who slaughter down to 2 kg each, and the wholesale price is $5/kg sooooooooooo

18000x2=36000x$5/kg=180000 and we'll assume 20% net profit---$36000  $12 bucks on swabs is  0.0000000001% or less

In the manufacturing world, you're looking at HUGE numbers when it comes to volume of material/swab

...

In the manufacturing world, you're looking at HUGE numbers when it comes to volume of material/swab

Ideally that would be true.  For commodities it could be, especially if all you're doing is very inexpensive and imprecise swab testing that exemplifies the futility of testing heterogeneous lots of material.  For many other categories of food, label declarations, and smaller manufacturer it is not.  I expect us to discontinue yet another set of products because the volume of declared allergen free sales isn't worth the testing and certification for one of our sites.

1a. $USD 13,000

1b. $USD 60,300

2. certainly not the over 700 trillion in sales Scampi's math implies

3. manufacturing

4. RTE and shelf stable meats

First, anyone testing a product so they can claim it is free of something has much higher costs than a company verifying cleaning procedures after an allergen is handled.  My only experience with testing for Allergens is the cleaning verification.  

I think you will find that small companies take a bigger hit on testing costs.  At a meat plant where only 800-1600 lbs of ground meat product are made 1 day a week, we use ~10 Allergen swabs initially on the equipment.  Somedays only a third of that is made with an Allergen containing ingredient.  If anything comes back positive, it has to be recleaned, re-sanitized and retested.  Depending on which piece of equipment that is, could be an hour of production loss.  Yes, I am looking for trends of the positives and also at the SSOP procedures in action to reduce positives.  There's a cost to that as well. 

My previous company made 50x times as much meat products daily and used fewer swabs each day but probably used about the same number of swabs per week.  

If the plant is using the Hygiena brand Allersnap devices, you need a incubation block and cold storage for the devices.  And the Hygiena devices use their Cal Check device for Calibration verifications at almost $600 each.  The start up cost to test in-house adds up quick.  You could request a quote from Hygiena and their competitor for the recommended items.  

For us, we spend more on E. Coli 0157 testing than Allergen testing.  Using an outside laboratory and courier, we are spending around $250 per 1200-1500 lbs of ground meat products (3 samples plus courier fee).  Then we have sampling required by USDA for ground and tenderized products but that is like 4 samples per quarter.  

 

2. certainly not the over 700 trillion in sales Scampi's math implies

 

Making up number now?

Hello everyone,

I am currently conducting research as part of my Master's degree, focusing on the cost of food testing in the industry, with a particular emphasis on allergen testing.

As part of my study, I am seeking input from a wide range of food businesses across the globe to gain insight into the financial impact of allergen monitoring.

If you're involved in a food business, I would be extremely grateful if you could share the following information:

1. Annual cost your business incurs specifically for allergen testing (in your local currency).

2. An estimate of what percentage of your net profit is invested in allergen monitoring and testing.

3. Your business category (e.g. manufacturer, retailer, food service, supplier, etc.).

4. A brief description of the type of products your business produces or sells.

All responses will be anonymized and used solely for academic research purposes. The goal of this project is to help improve understanding of the economic burden and variability of allergen control across the food industry.

Thank you in advance for your time and valuable input.

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or would like to learn more about the study.

All of our products contain the same 4 allergens that we have in our building, so:

1. Zero USD

2. Zero USD

3. Manufacturer

4. Dry blended mixes

We do still have an allergen program, and store them the same as if they were exclusive, sticker them, etc, so an argument could be made we spend some little amount of money annually on employee training, etc, but it's nominal at best.

We have an allergen program which includes among other things supplier approval and GMP's. Following our allergen control program no products we bottle, nothing we purchase (food grade lubes/greases etc) have allergens and employees are trained on their responsibilities in our allergen control program.

1. none
2. none
3. manufacturer (bottler/ honey packer)
4. Honey and various liquid sweeteners