Product category:
Food Processing News
News Release from: TempSys | Subject: CheckPoint
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 16 February 2005
Compliance with food processing
regulations
TempSys CheckPoint wireless system allows wireless food temperature monitoring relayed to a computer to track food cooking and chilling cycles, helping regulatory compliance in food processing
CheckPoint wireless temperature monitoring helps regulatory compliance in food processing The USDA FSIS (Food Safety Inspection Service) provides cooking and chilling compliance guidelines for meat and poultry products, details of which can be found on their website
This article was originally published on Processingtalk on 16 Nov 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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Meat and poultry establishments must operate under an approved HACCP plan, or demonstrate how their processes meet the lethality performance standards.
The FSIS provides time/temperature heating requirements (Appendix A) based on validated process schedules, and further providing different requirements based on the type of products, such as cooked beef, roast beef, cooked corned beef, cooked poultry rolls, cured and smoked poultry, etc.
Guidelines for corrective action and disposition of products are also given in the event of a heating deviation where, for example, a slow come up time results in a prolonged dwell time fostering the multiplication of pathogens.
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A computer modeling program is available to estimate the relative multiplication of bacteria to determine the proper disposition of the product.
Appendix B provides the compliance guidelines for cooling ready-to-eat roast beef, cooked beef, corned beef, fully cooked, partially cooked and char-marked and certain partially cooked or ready-to-eat poultry products.
Products must chill from 130F to 80F, the most hazardous temperature range where the most rapid growth of clostridia can occur, in less than 1.5 hours, and from 80F to 40F within the next 5 hours.
Products cured with nitrite can chill from 130F to 80F in 5 hours, and from 80F to 40F in the next 10 hours, for a total of 15 hours.
The cooling guidelines incorporate a small safety margin, so that immediate corrective action, such as re-cooking, must be taken to salvage the product.
If detailed time/temperature data is available, the results of a computer modeling or sampling may ensure product safety.
Furthermore, the establishment must document the cause of the deviation, adjust procedures to assure that the deviation will not recur, and inform the inspector of the findings and actions.
The most commonly used system to comply with these requirements is a manual method, where the time and temperature taken with a stem thermometer is written on a paper log sheet.
In the frenzied daily operations in a food processing plant, this task can sometimes be neglected, the hand written data may be inaccurate due to honest human error, or that the scribbling simply cannot be read because the paper got wet! The plant manager can spend many overtime hours filing the paperwork, and finding the data later in the right drawer can sometimes be a challenge.
Data loggers are frequently used to record the cook-chill temperature.
Some data loggers are capable of being placed inside an oven during the cooking process, but the sharp changes in temperature can form condensation inside the loggers, causing the electronics to fail.
Data loggers work well in recording the chill down temperatures, but since the data can be viewed only after downloading to a computer, it is then too late to take any corrective action if the data shows that a temperature deviation had occurred.
Faced with the challenge of simplifying and automating the monitoring of the cook-chill process, a small sausage manufacturer in Chicago set out to find a solution.
Bobak Sausage Company manufactures over 100 different tradition bound sausages and deli meat specialty products in Chicago since 1967, and its roots lead back to the Polish immigration.
Started by Frank Bobak, a sausage artisan from Poland, the business had grown over the years to become a permanent fixture of the large Polish community in Chicago.
The sausages are sold through its own chain of four grocery stores, and now are sold through other food retailers, such as Dominic's and Jewel Food Stores and other chains.
As the production volume continued to grow, enhancement of food safety has become a major objective not only to meet the USDA guidelines, but to meet Bobak's own high quality standards.
Stan Bobak, son of the founder and vice-president of Bobak Sausage, has highly computerised the entire operation and sought for a system to computerise the cook chill process in his factory.
Through an internet search, Bobak had found the CheckPoint wireless system, developed by TempSys.
"I found a wireless, computerised system that can track the chill down temperature of food product used by central kitchens for hospitals and airlines, but I wanted a system that can track both the cooking and chilling temperatures for our sausage manufacturing process," says Stan Bobak.
"At the time, we were only monitoring the chill down side of the cook chill process, so our transmitters could ride with the racks of food inside the blast chiller which was between 30 and 40 degrees F, and allow the cooks to view the temperature in real time on a computer," remarks Bob Yuan, the president and application designer for TempSys.
"Monitoring the cooking side posed us with a challenge to put the transmitters inside the ovens at over 160 degrees." The solution came by avoiding the issue.
The transmitters are mounted outside the oven with only the probes inside the oven to track the cooking process.
As soon as the cooking cycle is complete, the products are wheeled out of the oven, and the transmitters are transferred with the products directly into the blast chiller.
"It took some creative software programming, but we managed to seamlessly track all the control points in the cook-chill process," says Yuan.
The process begins when the uncooked sausages kept at under 40 degrees are placed on racks and wheeled into the oven.
Numerically identified probes are inserted into the sausages and the oven door is closed.
On a touch screen computer, the operator selects the probe number displayed on the screen, keys in the product ID, the lot number and quantity of the lot.
The cook-chill time and temperature parameters for the particular type of sausage appear automatically, and upon verifying the information, the operator clicks OK to start the job.
The programme can track an unlimited number of concurrent cooking and chilling jobs, and display the real-time product temperature and the elapsed time of each product in each phase of the cook-chill process.
When the cooking time and temperature requirements according to Bobak's quality standards and the USDA lethality guidelines are met, a colour change on the computer shows that cooking has ended, and the product has started the chill down phase.
As soon as the rack of the cooked sausages are pulled out of the oven, the transmitter assigned to the particular lot is disconnected and attached to another probe already inserted into the cooked sausage, then wheeled directly into the blast chiller room.
During the chill down phase, the operator can continue to see the real time temperature of the product, until a final colour change will indicate that the safe temperature of 40 degrees has been reached.
The moment a time/ temperature deviation occurs any time during the cooking process, or if the two-step USDA chill down process of 130 to 80 degrees within 1.5 hours and 80 to 40 degrees in the next 5 hours has been violated, an alert will prompt the operator to take immediate corrective action.
The programme will automatically record all alerts and corrective action taken to remedy such deviation.
Any portion of the time/temperature data can be zoomed in on a chart, and automatically export to an Excel spreadsheet if a computer modeling should be required.
At the end of the day, an automated report will print to show every numerically sequential cook-chill job, showing the product identification, user name, and the complete time/temperature control points for the entire cook-chill processes in compliance with Appendix A and B, as required by the USDA.
"I had no doubt in my mind that a wireless system was going to work," remarks Bobak, "and now not only is our computerised records complete and accurate, but the productivity gain and enhancement in information quality are remarkable.
We even have a sensor inside our blast chiller, so the computer now tells us to take corrective action if the blast chiller temperature gets too high when we might be chilling too much products at the same time." Bobak plans to completely monitor his entire facility with wireless temperature sensors installed in every storage area throughout the plant, including monitoring the raw meat temperature as the products are moved through receiving, cutting, preparing, processing and shipping.
A fully computerised and wireless temperature monitoring and recording system for the entire refrigeration storage and cook-chill processes, far exceeding regulatory compliance requirements, will soon be in place.
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