Quality Assurance professionals are expected to be experts in dozens of food safety topics, including allergen management. While others may create the recipes, source the ingredients or design the packaging and marketing, it is arguably the QA team that holds the biggest responsibility: keeping customers safe and healthy.

Between FSMA and FALCPA, manufacturers are required to take an extremely active role in evaluating the risk of common food allergens. And for good reason; more than 25% of Americans are impacted by food allergies and intolerances.

Because allergens are only one of many hazards a QA team must monitor for, it’s no surprise that many companies feel uncertain of how best to handle their own allergen management program. While the requirements may be obvious for some facilities, most of the time a facility will need a great deal of research and evaluation to come up with a strategy. A good allergen management plan will consist of a mix of smart facility design, deliberate processes for ingredient storage and handling, validated cleaning procedures and allergen testing on location as well as at a third-party lab. Plus, of course, employee training, vendor screening, record keeping and more. It’s a lot!

That’s why it’s so crucial for a QA team to surround itself with people who get it, and people who care. At Emport LLC, we consider ourselves partners, not vendors. We get it: Our team has been assisting gluten-free and allergen-free manufacturers since 2011. And, we care: We’re here to connect our customers to whatever they might need to keep their foods free of gluten and unexpected allergens.

At Emport LLC, we offer rapid onsite test kits like GlutenTox, AlerTox and AllerSnap — and also the training, advising and trouble-shooting that comes along with testing for gluten and allergens on site. We want to ensure that our customers are using the right kits, for the right items, at the right times, in the right ways. Anything less is a dangerous waste of money.

Additionally, Emport LLC is proud to carry a variety of supplementary materials that factor into a robust allergen management plan: proficiency tests, reference standards, lab consumables and more. We’re also thrilled to put our decade of experience to work for our customers. Whether it’s questions for a third-party lab, a food safety consultant or even a food safety certification scheme — if we don’t know the answer, we know someone who does, and we’ll make the introduction.

If you’re reading this and feeling unsure about any element of your allergen control plan, give us a call at 412-447-1888 or visit emportllc.com. We’d love to chat. After all, that’s one way we live our motto: More safe food, more happy people.

Every day, food safety labs are challenged to balance accurate, reliable results with operational efficiency. Food safety professionals are responsible for testing the quality of manufactured food — a step that’s critical but, depending on the approach, can be time consuming.

Many labs use agar plates and manual counting of colonies by technicians, but this approach can be tedious. Technicians sometimes encounter difficult-to-interpret indicator tests, making it a challenge to quickly count colonies. Some labs may also lack the software infrastructure to turn data into actionable insights.

That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. The advent of AI has enabled the development of automated colony enumeration systems that can provide colony counts that are practically equivalent to a trained microbiologist count.

3M Solution Utilizes Artificial Intelligence for Faster Plate Enumeration

Inspired to help labs achieve faster food safety testing results, 3M introduced the 3M^™ Petrifilm^™ Plate Reader Advanced, which utilizes fixed artificial intelligence networks that were trained by a 3M microbiologist to count colonies using a wide assortment of foods.

The system enumerates 10 different 3M^™ Petrifilm^™ Plates and can process up to 900 plates per hour. Providing results in 6 seconds or less, it can reduce the time it takes to enumerate results by up to 94%. The system also provides results tracking, trending and analysis, enabling users to create reports and graphs to assist in compliance and proactively facilitate actionable insights and continuous process improvement.

Studies Demonstrate Potential Productivity Increase

In comparison to manual counting, 3M internal and external studies have demonstrated a potential productivity increase based on reduced time to enumerate 3M^™ Petrifilm^™ Plates when using 3M™ Petrifilm™ Plate Reader Advanced. One study, using third-party food testing laboratories and funded by 3M, compared the time required for manual counting versus the time required for counting by the 3M^™ Petrifilm™ Plate Reader Advanced. The study used 3M^™ Petrifilm^™ Aerobic Count Plates and 3M^™ Petrifilm^™ Rapid Aerobic Count Plates that contained low, medium and high levels of colonies.

Overall, when combining the 3M^™ Petrifilm^™ Aerobic Count Plates and 3M^™ Petrifilm^™ Rapid Aerobic Count Plates, the study demonstrated time savings with the 3M™ Petrifilm^™ Plate Reader Advanced of 91% to 94% on average, for plates with high inoculum levels and 83% or greater for plates with medium inoculum levels. Even for plates with low inoculum levels, time savings of 56% or greater were observed when using the 3M^™ Petrifilm^™ Plate Reader Advanced.

Productivity is Priceless

Now more than ever, productivity is priceless. Advanced food testing technology like the 3M^™ Petrifilm^™ Plate Reader Advanced can help streamline operations and position food safety testing laboratories for success by enabling more productivity and increased capacity.

Deep-orange strands from delicate violet saffron flowers are good as gold to Mohammad Salehi.

To him, it’s a sacred spice that promises opportunity for farmers in his home province of Herat, Afghanistan, education for children who benefit from some of its profits and a culinary delicacy for United States chefs who can buy it from his company, Heray Spice.

“The saffron is not appreciated in the local [Afghani] market — no one cares for the farmers,” Salehi said, noting how farmers are limited in the crops they can grow. They are constantly influenced by Taliban insurgents who want them to grow opium since the drug trade finances its insurgency activities.

In 2002 after the fall of the Taliban, when the U.S. and United Nations (U.N.) extended support to cultivate other products such as saffron, some farmers in Salehi’s home region of Haret, which borders Iran, took advantage of the opportunity.

Some members of Salehi’s family began farming saffron after the fall of the Taliban, finding it more profitable than other crops. Meanwhile, Salehi, who was an interpreter for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, relocated to Chicago in 2014 under a program offered to those who risked their lives to fight terrorist organizations. After working several jobs to make a living, he returned to his home country to visit and hatched a plan to start a business.

Heray Spice — essentially a farming co-op — was born in 2017 with three farmers and six seasonal harvesters. Since then, it has grown to 28 farmers and about 20 seasonal workers, all of whom are paid 30-50% more than market value. Ten percent of the proceeds go toward schools in the Herat province.

“I wanted to do something in connection with my country — to say, ‘This is from my land, this is what my family is doing,’ ” said Salehi.

In August 2021, the Taliban regained control of the country after the U.S. withdrawal. Salehi said businesses, such as his, are worried about the stability of the country and their operations. He also said he is worried about whether the Taliban will continue to allow women to work because they account for 80% of Heray’s operations and labor during harvest season. “We are hopeful and fearful at the same time,” he said.

Meanwhile, Salehi remains highly motivated to create an entrepreneurial venture that can give back while focusing on producing a safe, consistent and quality product. Here’s how he does it.

Uncommon Practices

Salehi’s goal for Heray Spice is threefold: to help farmers, support the region’s children and introduce a special product to chefs and American households. His company is a vehicle for opportunity. And Heray Spice invests in its people by providing training, sanitary supplies and good wages.

Salehi himself also serves as food safety manager for Heray. “Spices are not like other products a restaurant buys like meat,” he said. “A spice has a bigger lifecycle, with cultivation in April or May and harvest in November, then it takes two to three months to pick and clean the flowers.”

Each flower produces only three strands that must be carefully cleaned by hand, then dried before undergoing microbial lab tests so it can be sent to the U.S.

“Since we are working with a generation of farmers who get up in the early morning and go to the fields, then return at night to sleep, we have to train them and keep them consistent with sanitation,” Salehi says.

Every saffron flower is touched by the hands of a farmer — which is quite different than other crops that can be harvested mechanically. Heray Spice holds pre-harvest seminars about proper sanitation. “We give them soap and sanitation supplies,” Salehi said, “and tell them, ‘We don’t want you to store it at home. Use them. If you need more, ask us. Before you go to pick up the flowers, you have to wash your hands with soap.’ ”

Admittedly, these aren’t common practices among farmers in his region — or in most spice-producing regions of the world, for that matter, Salehi said. So, promoting quality and safety requires a mindset shift and motivation. “We say, ‘This is what we ask of you, and this is what we give you in return,’ ” he said of the much higher pay the co-op farmers yield.

Heray Spice also provides farmers with baskets so they don’t use vessels from home or their own pockets to store and transport the strands to the company’s processing site. “The fact that we train our farmers is what makes our processing of spices different than others you find at the local market,” Salehi said. “We want to control the safety from harvest time to the table of American people as much as we can.”

Process & Progress

Another challenge in spices, aside from their lengthy and labor-intensive nature, is the range of variables that can potentially interfere with quality since the spice is imported. The saffron must be properly stored and not exposed to too much light, which can compromise its potency.

But Heray Spice can reduce contamination by 80% because processing happens in the Heray Spice facility, not on farmers’ properties or in their homes, which is a typical practice. Women working in the plant wear masks and adhere to sanitary procedures. Saffron is usually heat-dried to improve sanitation, since the region’s wind and sand can interfere with quality when the product is dried outdoors. The conditions must be just right for Heray Spice to use its rooftop for drying. “Then, it is collected, packed and stored in our office in a cool, dry place,” Salehi said.

Twenty-pound batches of saffron are tested in an Afghan lab built by the U.S. government before shipping. “From the U.S. border, it comes to our offices in Chicago, and if customers want an additional lab test with U.S. results, we work with a lab in the area and can send those results to the client,” Salehi said.

Salehi expects to grow the co-op base now that restaurants have reopened and there’s more demand for the product. And above all, he’s proud of the nurturing aspect of the business, which he compares to how a mom feeds her children. “Whenever we feed people with good product, with saffron, I personally feel proud of that,” Salehi said. “Because of the hard work of our farmers, we are bringing a good ingredient here, and that gives me a sense of pride, too, because now Afghanistan’s people are giving back and helping this country. I was given help by this country, so that sense of nurturing people brings me a smile.”

The author is a frequent contributor to Quality Assurance & Food Safety magazine.

Flies might be an annoying nuisance when you are trying to enjoy a mocha at your local coffee shop, but a health inspector will use terms such as “vector of disease” and “food safety risk” to describe these tiny, winged insects. Whether you operate out of a storefront or a stand-alone food production facility, these little pests can be a big issue, regardless of the auditor or inspector.

But what happens when controlling these pests seems impossible? For instance, even though you have excellent sanitation, a well-maintained exterior envelope and you may be performing strong pest management techniques, uncontrolled arthropods may be a persistent problem in your facility. Before they drive you mad, consider if the facility simply sucks.

Let me explain! I am not suggesting that your facility is necessarily bad. I am suggesting the building’s air pressure may be negative, which means it sucks air, and arthropods, in. That is why you must always consider negative air pressure (NP) in your pest control solutions.

What is negative air pressure?

NP is the force that pulls air into a building like a giant facility-wide vacuum. Small arthropods that are naturally impacted by air movement (e.g., midges, mosquitoes, spiders that use ballooning, etc.), as well as some that are not, may be forced inside. This can cause thousands of pests to unwillingly enter a single window each day and may render traditional control measures ineffective. It does not matter if the problem is in your food processing facility or your warehouse — NP presents a significant food safety issue.

The most obvious pest management symptom of NP is significantly elevated flying insect activity inside. NP is powerful enough to draw midges straight through a window screen, which can in turn drive a facility to extreme preventative measures. That is why, when I discover a facility is installing breezeways at every entrance, covering window openings with furnace filter media and requesting frequent exterior pesticide treatments, I understand all of these to be secondary symptoms of a NP problem. It is remarkable to see that level of dedication to pest management prevention. However, those corrective actions usually do not solve the pest problem.

Physical signs of negative air pressure.

The most significant non-pest related sign that points to a NP issue is difficulty entering an exterior door.

When extra force is required to pull an exterior door open an inch before the door becomes free and swings open normally, you may have a NP problem. You also may see an adjacent breezeway door magically open or ceiling tiles flutter when you open one exterior door.

If the problem is not so evident, performing the tissue test might reveal a less forceful NP issue. While your facility’s production lines and exhaust fans are running, place a tissue against the outside of a production-area window screen. If the tissue sticks to the screen, then a NP problem exists. I will explain the production importance later.

Causes of negative air pressure.

When a building is being constructed, its air pressure is neutral, just like outside air, and freely moves inside and outside. Once the windows, doors and ventilation system are installed, the building is placed under pressure. If more force is directing air into the building than out, it has positive pressure. The opposite is also true. If more air is directed out than in, the building has negative pressure. When that happens, negative pressure makes up the difference by forcing air (and pests) in through windows, doors and gaps.

When a commercial/industrial facility is built, air pressure needs are assessed, and a HVAC system is designed to introduce enough treated fresh air to keep air pressure as close to neutral as possible without becoming negative. This treated, or filtered, air is called make-up air. Considerations for needed make-up air include estimating how much ventilation the facility will need and how much air will be exhausted from equipment. For instance, if a piece of food-processing equipment will exhaust through a roof vent, the facility needs to make up the difference to keep air pressure in check.

You may notice NP issues arise when equipment or ventilation is added. During the excitement of growth, the process of quickly installing new equipment, as well as budgetary pressures, may mean not conducting a formal building pressure diagnosis, and make-up air might be neglected. This is the typical reason for NP issues. Though it seems like a harmless oversight, the extra exhausted air creates pressure without notice and that pressure void demands outside air. Immediately, nearby gnats, who are enjoying their brief life outside, are vacuumed into the interior of the facility.

How to turn a negative into a positive.

Navigate the challenges of NP by following these three steps:

1. Identify the presence of NP by performing the tissue test during production. From outside the facility, place a tissue against the outside of a production-area window screen. Be certain the facility is in full operation during the test. If all exhausting and venting equipment is not operating, the building will essentially be depressurized and not give accurate results.
2. If discovered, educate your executive team on the facts of negative air pressure. Teach them what NP is, how it becomes a problem and its evidence in the facility. Explain small arthropod susceptibility to NP and connect it to the presence of arthropods in the facility.
3. Hire a HVAC contractor to address the building’s NP. They may perform a formal building pressure diagnosis. They can design and install a make-up air system.

If the thought of expending significant capital for a make-up air unit seems to be too much for your company, consider what one facility we serve did. They had a temporary make-up air system installed in a seldom-used receiving dock. This allowed them to see the impact of a new system firsthand. After a season with the new system in place and roughly a 95% decline in flying insect activity, they were able to justify the installation of a permanent make-up air system.

So, if flies are driving you crazy, keep your chin up and keep it positive (air pressure, especially). Positive pressure may be just what you need to keep your facilities and food safe.