Thank God it's Friday
We recently had a major roof leak in our refrigerated warehouse onto several racks of packaged and vacuum sealed bulk cheese products. I placed all products on hold and performed sampling of all the products in order to ascertain any widespread contamination issues.
My concern is the following:
- management did not want/allow cleaning immediately after the leak stopped (product has been sitting in potentially contaminated packaging for more than a day at this point...)
- The leak was severe enough that the exterior corrugate packaging was soaked all the way through on multiple skids.
Based on history and case study, even though testing was performed, this cannot 100% exclude the risk of pathogen contamination on bulk product. There is talk of deboxing and repackaging suspect product into fresh packaging but my concern is that the plastic direct packaging could still be contaminated and our process involves bringing this directly into our RTE processing area where it comes into contact with direct product contact processing utensils and buckets. In addition, we have not performed a validation study on the use of approved chemicals on vacuum sealed material,
Am I crazy for pursuing that this product be disposed of or is this something that is verifiable as safe?
Thanks in advance for any comments!