Validating Gloves Free Practices

I recently started at a new company where one of the value added comments from their last SQF audit was to perform a sanitation validation for employees not wearing gloves while handling food. Our current practitioner said that the auditor last year wanted us to validate this by swabbing hands of employees before and after handwashing, but this seems strange to me so I was wondering if anyone has performed similar validations?

For reference we are a dried pasta manufacturer and employees will touch the pasta throughout the production process (before and after drying). We do not perform a kill step as the consumer must boil the pasta prior to consumption.

TIA

Hi rmoriarty,

:welcome:

Welcome to the IFSQN forums.

Understand that your products are being boiled by the customer but since your employees are handling the products you don’t want to add unnecessary contamination to the product which may be handled by the customer prior to cooking.

In addition, the SQF Code does require personnel to have clean hands:

11.3.2 Handwashing

11.3.2.1 All personnel shall have clean hands … etc.

A few hand swabs now and again would not hurt to monitor that handwashing is being carried out and is effective. So, bit of monitoring/verification. Not validation.

Kind regards,

Tony