Organic Processing Vo1.9 #3

tion to the consumer, retrieval of the recalled product, investigation of the episode, etc. In a similar incident, a company was saved from a potential recall when a well-trained employee noted that an ingredient was somewhat off-color. When management was alerted, the company realized that the supplier had sent baking chips with peanut butter instead of milk chocolate. One episode of this sort pays for the cost of the allergen training for employees.

In another recent recall, a company was auditing a supplier and realized that an ingredient should have been labeled as milk-derived but had not been. The level of milk in the consumer product was small and no consumer complaints were received. Yet the company initiated a voluntary recall of the product because they realized that it contained undeclared milk. The absence of consumer complaints does not necessarily mean that the product did not cause or have the potential to cause allergic reactions.

In a third episode, a margarine manufacturer put the incorrect lid on tubs of margarine. As a result, the product contained undeclared milk from the flavoring ingredient at low levels. While no consumer complaints were received, the product was recalled because it contained undeclared milk.

Evaluating Cleaning Procedures

So how do you make sure that your ingredient suppliers and copack-ers are avoiding allergens? Shared equipment is used very commonly in the food industry and oftentimes allergenic ingredients are processed on the same equipment as nonallergenic ingredients, thus cleaning between these formulations is critical.

Allergen cleaning should be de-
fined as the absence of detectable al-
lergen residues on equipment
surfaces following cleaning. The best
detection methods are enzyme-linked
immunosorbent assays that are highly specific for allergen residues
such as the Neogen Alert, Reveal or Biokits, which are available for
many of the Big 8 foods. Positive controls should be run on the dirty
equipment before cleaning to assure that the method of choice is suit-
able for detection of residues of that particular allergen. Sometimes,
allergen loads are quite low with ingredients derived from the aller-
genic source, e.g., soy lecithin, so the residues will be undetectable
even before sanitation. Once a cleaning approach is validated by analy-
sis, the consistent application of that procedure should assure that the
product will not contain undeclared allergen residues.

Cluck.

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