• Start by mapping your entire facility into zones, where 1 is the most critical, surrounded by zones 2, 3, and 4.
• Collaborate with your team to identify the most relevant test points while mapping the complete environment. For example, map entry points and traffic flow patterns.
• Determine the testing scheme best suited to your test points’ unique purposes.
• When evaluating how important given test points are, consider how challenging the surface is to clean.
• Regularly monitor Zone 1 test points, especially before employee use, as these areas pose the highest risk.
• Monitor lower-risk areas often enough to ensure sanitation efforts are sufficient to secure your facility’s inner zone safety.
• Evaluate ATP results and trends over time to increase the effectiveness of your cleaning process and lower your overall risk.

Creating Food Safety and HACCP Plans

Food safety encompasses many procedures to keep raw materials and processed foods safe for human consumption. HACCP and Food Safety Plans are essential aspects of a food safety system. Learning how to create a HACCP or Food Safety Plan and using verification tools for critical controls and process controls can help your operation protect consumers and maintain compliance.

What Is HACCP? What Is a HACCP Plan?

HACCP stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points and is designed to recognize and mitigate biological, chemical, and physical hazards in food production. HACCP encompasses every part of the food production process. Procurement, handling, raw material production, manufacturing, and distribution are all covered by HACCP. The USDA-FSIS and FDA have mandated all seafood, juice, meat, and poultry processing facilities comply with HACCP.

HACCP Plans provide a list of procedures necessary for maintaining food safety. These plans involve identifying hazards, finding critical controls within the process, and establishing ways to mitigate them. Prerequisite programs, such as Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP’s) and sanitation standard operating procedures (SSOPs), are essential for the developing and implementing HACCP Plans.

What is a Food Safety Plan?

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) defines specific rules that food manufacturers must follow. Companies that fall under FSMA and are not regulated by HACCP must have a written Food Safety Plan to satisfy the Preventive Controls for Human Food Rule. The Food Safety Plan takes a preventive approach to control hazards and encompasses HACCP Principles. According to the FDA, a Food Safety Plan “consists of the primary documents in a preventive controls food safety system that provides a systematic approach the identification of food safety hazards that must be controlled to prevent or minimize the likelihood of foodborne illness or injury. It contains a collection of written documents that describe activities that ensure the safety of food during manufacturing, processing, packing, and holding.”

 

Why Are Food Safety and HACCP Plans Important?

These plans are important to agricultural and food production for several reasons. They are a reliable method for reducing and preventing foodborne illness. Foodborne illnesses are a critical global issue. The CDC estimates that in the United States, around 48 million people get sick from a foodborne illness every year. Worldwide, these illnesses are estimated to affect 600 million people annually.

While most people who experience these illnesses recover, certain populations, like the elderly, children, and immunocompromised, can face more severe hospitalizations and even death. Food Safety and HACCP Plans allow food manufacturers to prevent these illnesses by identifying and developing controls in the production process.

Whether you are a supplier of raw ingredients or have your company’s branded products on the shelf, your operation’s commitment to a HACCP or Food Safety Plan can enhance your reputation. This standing as a company with an exceptional food safety culture can lead to improved connections and trust within your supply chain as well as help attract new business.

 

What Are the Differences Between a HACCP and a Food Safety Plan?

When developing either a Food Safety or HACCP Plan, it is important to review the guidelines in depth. A HACCP and Food Safety Plan have subtle differences, and it’s important to identify them for specific manufacturing requirements. Some of the primary differences between a HACCP and a Food Safety Plan are as follows:

HAZARD ANALYSIS

Manufacturers must identify biological, chemical, and physical hazards with HACCP Plans. In a Food Safety Plan, manufacturers must also consider radiological hazards and economically motivated adulteration.

PREVENTIVE CONTROLS

HACCP Plans identify critical control points (CCPs) within the process, while Food Safety Plans identify both process control points and CCPs determined by the facility. For example, sanitation is a prerequisite for HACCP, while it is considered a verifiable process control in a Food Safety Plan.

CCP and PARAMETERS

In both HACCP and Food Safety Plans, critical limits are required for CCPs. Food Safety Plans also require that there should be other defined process parameters that are unrelated to a specific hazard but contribute to the safe production of the food.

MONITORING

Both HACCP and Food Safety Plans require monitoring. Once a hazard is identified and preventive controls are established, monitoring is required to maintain the controls.

CORRECTIVE ACTIONS

The HACCP Plan requires corrective action when there is a deviation from a CCPs critical limit. With the Food Safety Plan, an immediate resolution may be used rather than a corrective action.

VERIFICATION

HACCP Plans require verification procedures, including frequent reviews of the HACCP Plan to ensure it is followed correctly. Food Safety Plans require verification activities based on the nature of the preventive control.

RECORD-KEEPING

The organizations must maintain records for CCPs in the HACCP Plans. However, with Food Safety Plans, organizations should keep records for all preventive controls, not just those related to the specific CCP for hazard control.

VALIDATION

HACCP plans require validation of the entire plan. Food Safety Plans require validation activities when evidence is required to justify specific controls are needed to mitigate hazards.

RECALL PLANS

A Food Safety Plan must have a recall plan for each product with a hazard requiring preventive controls. HACCP, however, does not require a recall plan.

How Can Charm Help with Your HACCP and Food Safety Plan Needs?

Charm Sciences provides the food industry with various testing kits for ATP sanitation verification, allergenic food cleaning, mycotoxins, antibiotic residues, microbial detection, and more.

Charm products can help your operation identify contamination levels at every stage in production, from raw material storage to post-processing and packaging.

Our kits allow your employees to easily test their critical limits and maintain effective controls for either a HACCP or Food Safety Plan.

What sets Charm apart from other test kit suppliers is the customer support to help create effective process controls that record results and communicate control issues to all food manufacturing stakeholders.

About Charm Sciences

Established in 1978 in Greater Boston, Charm Sciences helps protect consumers, manufacturers, and global brands from a variety of issues through the development of food safety, water quality, and environmental diagnostics tests and equipment. Selling directly and through its network of distributors, Charm’s products serve the dairy, feed and grain, food and beverage, water, healthcare, environmental, and industrial markets in more than 100 countries around the globe.

Environmental Monitoring with Indicator Tests

An article in Food Safety Tech by Jeff Clinton, What Food Manufacturers Can Learn from the Baby Formula Recall, discusses costly lessons learned from recent food recalls. Among the recommendations are having a robust sanitation program and empowering employees. One of the best ways to accomplish these recommendations is to establish and validate an environmental monitoring program using indicators. Some of which can give results in real-time. 

Validate Environmental Monitoring

Proper remediation of positive locations and additional surveillance samples surrounding the positive, called vectoring, are ways of reducing the risk of pathogen contamination in food production zones. For example, Adenosine Tri-Phosphate (ATP) and aerobic counts are good indicators of Listeria risk. Whereas ATP and Enterobacteriaceae (EB) bacteria are good indicators of Salmonella risk. ATP testing provides real-time results to sanitation and production personnel, allowing immediate cleaning as remediation before food contact or processing. Environmental monitoring for bacterial indicators provides a food plant with quick 24-hour results that acts as a report card on how the ongoing sanitation program is working. Quality personnel may adjust procedures to testing locations to focus on problematic areas, including zone, surrounding areas, and products needing more attention.

Importance of Indicator Tests

In past decades, criticisms of using indicator tests were that they are not sensitive enough, nor specific, to detect pathogens at the low levels tolerated in finished foods or raw materials, which is at the single colony-forming unit CFU/25 gram or 100 gram or 375-gram food.  However, manufacturers have learned that indicators are very effective because they are the first simple and fast checks indicative of potential process control breakdown. Indicators are like a micro alarm verifying sanitation processes are working. With repeated testing, remediation, and vectoring in zones surrounding the primary production zone, the higher-risk areas for pathogens are identified and reduced. There is also a great benefit in programs like these for improving and extending product shelf-life.

Because indicator tests are not as sensitive as pathogen tests, it makes sense that environmental tests and raw material tests be as sensitive as possible. This is particularly true for critical food production, like infant formula, intended for consumers with immature or compromised immune systems.  A plant manager at an infant formula plant can rest easier knowing that their EB test is detecting 1CFU/5 mL from an environmental swab in their critical zones, which is five times more sensitive than the normal practice of 1CFU/1 mL of swab broth. This high-sensitivity test provides five times the cleaning verification of sanitation programs and improvement from standard practices. Likewise, a food plant can use higher sensitivity indicator tests with incoming raw material testing. For example, an infant formula plant can verify less than 1 CFU EB per gram of milk powder using two high-sensitivity tests as opposed to the standard practice of 10 CFU EB per gram.

Turn to Charm Sciences for Verifying Food Safety Practices

Charm Sciences is a manufacturer and supplier of ATP sanitation and microbial indicator tests to the food industry.  We offer a variety of real-time, high-sensitivity ATP indicator tests for water and also for allergen cleaning verification. We make 5 mL volume microbial tests for Enterobacteriaceae, coliform, E. coli, and yeast and mold. Charm is also a partner to the food industry providing testing services and working with our stakeholders to develop sanitation and raw material testing protocols that address the industry’s hazards and risk assessments.

The lessons learned from food recalls are reminders that food production plants must maintain their due diligence in training personnel and empower them to do corrections and remediations in their daily production routines. Equipping plant personnel with Charm Sciences’ tools provides a solid foundation to reduce food safety risks which is the goal of all quality programs.

About Charm Sciences

Established in 1978 in Greater Boston, Charm Sciences helps protect consumers, manufacturers, and global brands from a variety of issues through the development of food safety, water quality, and environmental diagnostics tests and equipment. Selling directly and through its network of distributors, Charm’s products serve the dairy, feed and grain, food and beverage, water, healthcare, environmental, and industrial markets in more than 100 countries around the globe.

Managing Mycotoxins in Feed Mills

Certain molds and fungi produce mycotoxins — toxic compounds that lead to adverse effects in animals and humans when consumed. Many commodities such as grains, flours, rice, and corn are susceptible to mycotoxin contamination, and many of these ingredients are typical in feed mills. With such a high risk for contaminated ingredients, feed mills need to implement extensive quality control processes and testing to protect their businesses and consumers.

Mycotoxins in the Feed Industry

The ingredients used in feed mills can account for 70 to 90% of the cost of producing feeds. Therefore, the quality of your raw materials directly relates to your company’s profitability.

While your feed quality is essential to your company’s success, it’s also critical for protecting animals and consumers. If your contaminated feed infects animals, you can affect the livelihood of a farm and risk infecting consumers who eat the animal products.

Mycotoxin Prevention in Feed Mills

While your feed mill cannot completely prevent contamination risk for mycotoxins, you can employ several mitigation techniques to reduce the chances. The following methods can improve your mill’s feed quality and prevent dangerous infections from moving between animals and humans.

Create and Maintain a Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) Program

With ingredients comprising most of the costs related to feed, your quality standards relate directly to your mill’s profitability. Your ingredients must meet rigorous quality standards and be clean of harmful contaminants like mycotoxins.

A QA/QC program should define what, when, and how to measure. Your QA/QC policies should clearly define running controls to verify kit integrity, calibrating equipment, and completing proficiency testing to verify operator proficiency.  

Once you’ve built your QA/QC program, you gain control over your processes. With frequent testing, you can identify when batches are safe to move to the next stage and when they’re contaminated.

Streamline Processes

Mycotoxin testing can be complex. Most feed mill operations handle testing year-round for multiple mycotoxins, such as aflatoxin, vomitoxin (DON), fumonisin, and zearalenone. Operations may run four separate tests in sequence or run them simultaneously, potentially disrupting results and disregarding protocol.

Streamlining your testing process is essential for gathering clear results and maintaining your QA/QC policies. Finding a test provider that makes this streamlining possible can mitigate mycotoxins in feed mill operations.

Communicate With Suppliers

Many feed mills rely on byproducts from various suppliers to develop their products. The quality of these ingredients will directly affect the presence of mycotoxins in your operation, so it’s essential to communicate with these suppliers. When developing contracts, require testing from your providers and discuss regular auditing to ensure your suppliers are trustworthy over time.

Manage Audit-Compliant Data

Since mycotoxins can travel from raw ingredients to humans and animals, confirmation of non-contamination is critical for various parties. Data collection is a way to prove that you’ve tested your materials and operated within industry limits for different contaminants.

Government audits will typically ask for this data to confirm your operation’s compliance with relevant regulations. Beyond these federal audits, you may also face inspections from your customers. Whether you’re producing feed for livestock or dogs, your customers will want to know they can trust your products and your brand. Additionally, you can use your data as a reference during process improvements.

Audit-compliant data requires well-organized files and easily exported information. These characteristics make it easy to find specific datasets and transfer them to preferred file types for review.

Follow Through With Corrective Actions

Tracking data, communicating with suppliers, and maintaining a QA/QC program can all contribute to mycotoxin mitigation at your mill. However, mistakes can still occur. Your QA program and data collection can help you identify where errors may have occurred in your process, from suppliers to storage.

Once you identify the root cause of a mistake, take corrective actions to fix it for future events. For example, suppose a supplier provides contaminated ingredients that your team missed before processing. In that case, corrective actions can include requiring testing documentation from your suppliers and testing at your facility once you receive the ingredients.

Continually introducing these corrective actions can significantly improve your feed mill quality control.

Promote a Health and Safety Culture

While you can implement the systems necessary to mitigate mycotoxin risks, your team must align with these procedures. Comprehensive training programs are the best way to make employees aware of safety practices.

Developing a health and safety culture involves encouraging habits. For example, employees should know to report gaps in procedures when they see them. You can also encourage an environment of support for reporting.

A safety culture, paired with the above tips, can offer comprehensive mycotoxin mitigation at your feed mill.

How Can Charm Help Your Feed Mill Quality?

Implement rapid testing into your processes with Charm Sciences. Our Rapid One Step Assay (ROSA) test kits offer fast results for the presence of aflatoxin, DON, fumonisin, ochratoxin, T2/HT2, and zearalenone, and many are approved by USDA’s Federal Grain Inspection Service (FGIS) to ensure the integrity of your mycotoxin inspections at every stage of production.

With rapid tests, your operation can maintain quality control processes without falling behind. Keep your products and consumers safe and remain on a condensed timeline.

Choose Charm Mycotoxin Tests

The Charm EZ-M System has FGIS-approval for Aflatoxin, DON (Vomitoxin), Fumonisin, Ochratoxin A, and Zearalenone. And Charm is FGIS’s preferred supplier holding the contracts for aflatoxin, DON, and ochratoxin.

Charm Sciences is an industry leader in rapid testing kits for feed mills, grain production manufacturers, pet food suppliers, and more. Our rapid mycotoxin testing kits are simple to integrate into your production and QA processes. Our team provides 24-hour customer support in addition to our reliable testing kits to support your feed mill’s mycotoxin mitigation.

Contact us today to learn more about our mycotoxin testing solutions.

About Charm Sciences

Established in 1978 in Greater Boston, Charm Sciences helps protect consumers, manufacturers, and global brands from a variety of issues through the development of food safety, water quality, and environmental diagnostics tests and equipment. Selling directly and through its network of distributors, Charm’s products serve the dairy, feed and grain, food and beverage, water, healthcare, environmental, and industrial markets in more than 100 countries around the globe.

Preventing Food Recalls

Food recalls present a significant challenge to food production operations. While companies strive to use resources throughout their supply chains efficiently, they face gaps in processing, contamination, which lead to costly recalls, loss of reputation, and potential litigation.

In the face of possible recalls, food production facilities need to identify and address the major causes of these events. Understanding weak points and mitigating risks with defined production practices can reduce the potential for recalls, protect consumers, and safeguard brand integrity.

Why Is It Important to Prevent Food Recalls?

Food recalls can involve sickness and fatalities based on a flaw’s severity, so consumer safety is the primary reason for preventing food recalls. Beyond safety concerns, preventing food recalls is essential to the success of your business and the economy at large. Even a recall free from illness and fatalities can lead to millions of lost dollars.

Based on a study from 2011, the average cost of a recall is $10 million, but this study is still over a decade old. It fails to acknowledge stricter standards enforced by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), and it doesn’t account for inflation costs over time. While $10 million may have been a benchmark for food recall costs over ten years ago, it’s setting a low bar today.

The challenging aspect of food recall costs is where the losses originate. Direct costs for recalls include:

• Product retrieval
• Notification to consumers, supply chain, and regulatory bodies
• Storage
• Product destruction
• Losses from unsalable product
• Labor costs to manage the above processes
• Investigation for the root cause of the recall

These costs may seem like an enormous responsibility on their own, but these only relate directly to responding to the recall. Indirect costs associated with product recalls can include potential litigation, required governmental oversight, lost sales, a decline in your company’s market value, and damaged brand reputation.

Once your company has a reputation for selling unsafe food items, consumers are more likely to stop buying your products for a period of time or altogether. If you have more than one food recall to your name, recovering your reputation and the money spent can be an insurmountable challenge.

To mitigate massive losses, companies need to identify stronger food safety programs to deliver safe food products.

Leading Causes of Food Recalls

With growing regulations in place to identify faulty food items, the probability of food recalls has increased. In the United States, the leading types of food recalls include product contamination, misbranding, and unreported allergens. These food recalls all relate to gaps in quality control processes, whether the quality issues are present in production itself, suppliers, or the packaging lines.

Major contributions to food recalls in production facilities include a range of factors:

Deficiencies in Production and Monitoring

Production facilities must have outlined processes and procedures for efficiency and compliance. Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs), for example, is a defined system for quality control. If operations fail to comply with these practices, they are far more likely to experience food quality concerns.

Companies also rely on Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) within their facilities. These SOPs contribute to process efficiency, quality control, and product uniformity. When there’s a lack of accountability for following these procedures, product quality may be lacking and increase the potential for recalls once they reach consumers.

Deficiencies in production and monitoring are among the most significant food recall causes. Gaps in processing may lead to mislabeled products, undeclared ingredients, and sanitation concerns.

Cross-Contamination

Cross-contamination involves the unintentional transfer of chemical contaminants, microorganisms, and other foreign substances from people, food, and objects to food products. Typically, cross-contamination results from shortcuts in the production process and failing to keep tools, equipment, and uniforms clean.

An example of cross-contamination is using tools for raw meat, failing to clean them, and applying the same tools to ready-to-eat products. This shortcut in processing can lead to a transfer of pathogens.

Cross-contamination is also a significant contributor to unreported allergen recalls. If your equipment comes in contact with tree nuts and you use it for another product that does not contain this ingredient, those with allergies are at risk. This issue is particularly significant when labels do not report the possibility of tree nut contamination in manufacturing.

Pathogens

While pathogens can come from a lack of cleanliness in production, many pathogens originate from animals and raw agricultural goods. Food production facilities typically rely on suppliers to provide raw meats and agricultural goods, pointing to the importance of supplier screening and validation.

Since your suppliers can cause food recalls that cost your company millions, you should trust them to deliver pathogen-free items. Possible pathogens can include Salmonella, Listeria, and E. coli.

Physical Contamination

Non-food items in food products lead to immediate recall. Pests, glass, and metals are all common items that can contaminate food products during processing. These contaminants can enter food when machines break down or when human error occurs during processing. Contaminants can also be a result of limited screening by suppliers.

Preventing Recalls With Food Process Traceability

Food process traceability offers hope for mitigating food recalls. Supply chain traceability identifies and tracks product elements as they move their way through production — from sourcing raw goods to creating a final product. Traceability is key to identifying contamination before it reaches the market, protecting your company’s reputation, and saving your operation millions of dollars.

Implementing traceability is essential for any food processing operation, but there are other techniques you can introduce to your production line to reduce recall risk. These practices include:

• Cleaning and Sanitation: From cross-contamination to physical contaminants, cleaning and sanitation are critical for minimizing potential health concerns. Your SOPs should include defined sanitation procedures. You may also maintain separate tools and machinery for specific products to prevent unreported allergens. Asking your suppliers to identify their cleaning processes can add additional transparency to your supply chain.
• Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) Programs: HACCP programs aim to identify, analyze, and control chemical, biological, and physical hazards in production. These programs, paired with traceability, can help you catch mistakes before you release products to the public and allow your team to learn from these near-misses. Learning from hazards enables you to adjust your processes and prevent them in the future.
• Documentation: Documenting everything is vital for tracking your production process from beginning to end. Use your documentation as a reference for your HACCP programs and SOP development to ensure you’re applying all standard practices. Documentation is also valuable for complying with various regulatory bodies.
• Validation: Validation is a way to double-check product quality, and it’s a valuable aspect of quality assurance practices. Product validation varies depending on the stage of the production process. You may use X-ray equipment to detect physical contamination following processing. Your team may test raw agricultural goods for pathogens or chemical toxins before working with them. Identifying and implementing many forms of validation will offer the confirmation you need as products move through the supply chain.

Turn to Charm Sciences for Verifying Food Safety Practices

At Charm Sciences, we provide the tools food production facilities need to validate and verify their food safety practices. Our testing kits and equipment allow operations to detect harmful chemical contaminants, such as allergens, pesticides, antibiotics, and mycotoxins, and to verify sanitation using rapid ATP tests and indicator tests. Integrating these tools into your SOPs can verify your suppliers and track products as they move through processing.

Our solutions are essential to quality assurance programs across industries. Explore our products today, and contact our team to learn more about our solutions.

About Charm Sciences

Established in 1978 in Greater Boston, Charm Sciences helps protect consumers, manufacturers, and global brands from a variety of issues through the development of food safety, water quality, and environmental diagnostics tests and equipment. Selling directly and through its network of distributors, Charm’s products serve the dairy, feed and grain, food and beverage, water, healthcare, environmental, and industrial markets in more than 100 countries around the globe.

Fumonisin Test Designed for the Pet Food Industry

Charm Sciences is proud to announce the release of our new Fumonisin test strip, specifically designed for the pet food sector, ROSA FAST5-X Fumonisin Quantitative Test (FUMQ-FAST5-X). 

The Pet Food industry proactively monitors mycotoxin levels in grains and raw materials used in pet food manufacturing to prevent contamination in the finished product. This assessment has outlined the need for dependable mycotoxin test kits specific to the Pet Food industry. Charm Sciences has developed the FUMQ-FAST5-X strip, which tests for the presence of fumonisins (B1, B2, and B3) at an action level of 10 parts per million (ppm). 

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a Guidance for Industry document in 2001, with recommendations for fumonisins. The document stipulates domestic pet food must be produced and manufactured according to human-grade standards and not exceed 10 ppm fumonisins. These levels are based on studies that demonstrated that fumonisin levels above these levels could lead to neural dysfunction, abnormal behavior, liver damage, loss of movement control, appetite, weakness, depression, blindness, and brain damage. These levels do not apply to equine, where the guidance level is 5 ppm fumonisins. 

The FUMQ-FAST5-X strip detects 10 ppm fumonisins with a single dilution that allows the pet food sector to make immediate decisions on the acceptance or rejection of incoming raw products at the point of receipt. The development of the FUMQ-FAST5-X test is an example of Charm’s commitment to our customer’s immediate needs and our resolve to serve the requirement of the industries in which we work. 

Charm Sciences’ commitment to our customers is one of the reasons we maintain our high level of customer loyalty and satisfaction. For over forty years, we have been working to create custom solutions to the industry’s biggest problems. We do not provide a product; we provide solutions for our customers. And if we do not have a ready-to-use option, we can develop one. At Charm, we do not consider our clients as customers; we consider them partners. 

To learn more, follow Charm Sciences on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. 

About Charm Sciences

Established in 1978 in Greater Boston, Charm Sciences helps protect consumers, manufacturers, and global brands from a variety of issues through the development of food safety, water quality, and environmental diagnostics tests and equipment. Selling directly and through its network of distributors, Charm’s products serve the dairy, feed and grain, food and beverage, water, healthcare, environmental, and industrial markets in more than 100 countries around the globe.

Best Practices for Testing Zearalenone

Zearalenone has been identified as one of three significant mycotoxins to be on the lookout for during harvest season. Zearalenone, along with Aflatoxin and Deoxynivalenol (DON), has been found to have a higher prevalence of being above action limits. So how do we ensure it does not enter the food supply chain? The best practice is to test commodities multiple times at various stages before direct use and not rely on risk-based testing.   

What is Zearalenone

Zearalenone is an estrogenic mycotoxin in that it mimics estrogen, an essential hormone in reproduction. Zearalenone binds to the same receptors as the natural hormone estrogen, thus blocking it, causing increased estrogenic activity, which adversely affects reproduction through symptoms such as increased infertility, lowered embryo survival, and the attrition of testosterone in young male animals. 

The number one contributor affecting pig reproduction is Zearalenone. It is also directly linked to hormonal misbalance and numerous reproductive diseases in swine, cows, and chickens. In humans, the xenoestrogen effect causes hypoestrogenism, leading to estrogen-related diseases like prostate, ovarian, cervical, and breast cancers.

Controlling Zearalenone

Mycotoxin control is a highly complex problem, as mycotoxins are naturally found in all agriculture. Weather, heat stress, and irrigation play a large part in the proliferation of mycotoxins, and Zearalenone is no different. The Fusarium species, which produces Zearalenone, is a regular part of plant and soil flora and fauna. Producers can mitigate Fusarium risks by rotating, tilling, and sterilizing their field before planting. Using a fungicide throughout the growing season will also lower the risk of a fungal infestation taking hold.  Best practices will lower the risk of Zearalenone being present, but ultimately, the end-users act as the gatekeeper for the food supply chain.

Best Practices for Testing

The best way to detect Zearalenone and protect our supply chain is through testing at multiple stages of the life of the commodity prior to its end-use. You should test commodities when they arrive as a shipment, once the commodities enter storage, and immediately before use in producing human or animal foods.

This method identifies Zearalenone contaminated crops coming off the field and before storage, where they can proliferate. A final test, prior to use, will detect contamination that may have occurred during storage. Maintaining the integrity of the commodity will guarantee the quality and mitigate the risk to humans and animals alike.

The risk-based testing method uses weather forecasts by region and other factors to identify testing needs. But this method leaves the public and our potential food sources at risk. Only testing commodities in high-risk areas leaves a lot of room for contaminated feeds to make it into the supply chain.

Zearalenone Test Kits

Charm Sciences designs Zearalenone testing kits to provide rapid identification and screening of samples at the point of receipt, before or after storage, and pre-production.

Charm has the largest number of validated commodities and our ROSA WET-S5 Zearalenone Quantitative Test is USDA-FGIS approved for screening Zearalenone. By using a water-based extraction procedure, you can test for Zearalenone along with Aflatoxin, DON, and Fumonisin. Detect all four mycotoxins from just one extraction using our Rapid One Step Assay (ROSA) lateral flow technology.

How Charm Can Help

If you wish to learn more about Charm’s Zearalenone Tests, please connect with your local rep or click the link below.

Reach out anytime if you need help.

About Charm Sciences

Established in 1978 in Greater Boston, Charm Sciences helps protect consumers, manufacturers, and global brands from a variety of issues through the development of food safety, water quality, and environmental diagnostics tests and equipment. Selling directly and through its network of distributors, Charm’s products serve the dairy, feed and grain, food and beverage, water, healthcare, environmental, and industrial markets in more than 100 countries around the globe.

Sanitation in the Hotel Industry

Maintaining customer loyalty and confidence in the hotel industry means staying on top of sanitation practices. Disinfecting hotel rooms, frequently touched areas, and common spaces ensure guests remain healthy as we begin to travel again. COVID-19 has created an environment where customers are more hesitant to travel, and they need to feel safe when they do.

Hotel Sanitation Best Practices

Sanitation is an essential element of the hospitality industry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many hotels implemented new cleaning protocols to protect guests during their travels. Best practices in hotel sanitation include:

• Transparency about cleaning procedures: Guests want to know what the hotel is doing to keep everyone safe. Hotels that inform guests of their cleaning procedures can provide reassurance that they are using effective products and practices for sanitation.
• Frequently cleaning and disinfecting: The best hotel room sanitation includes proper cleaning, disinfecting, and sanitizing practices after every stay. Hotels can improve their sanitation by regularly using approved cleaners on surfaces, vacuuming, and verifying that these tasks have been completed.
• Ensuring compliance: Staff members and guests should follow the health and safety guidelines that hotels implement to keep everyone safe. Providing alcohol-based hand sanitizer and enhancing room cleaning help prevent the spread of illness and offer customers peace of mind.

The hotel industry needs to ensure consumer confidence. Hotels can verify that all areas — not just high-touch points — are properly cleaned and sanitized with regular ATP testing. ATP is an energy molecule in cells and biological materials, such as bacteria, respiratory droplets, mold, and more. Testing for ATP helps monitor surfaces to verify cleanliness and that cleaning staff thoroughly sanitized all contact surfaces.

How ATP Testing Works Within the Hotel Industry

To help confirm that hotels implement proper sanitizing procedures, you need a way to verify and prove it. Charm Sciences recently partnered with AAA Travel and added Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) testing as the key metric to accomplish this.

ATP testing and sanitation in the hotel industry helps managers, housekeeping, and other hotel staff identify places that need recleaning to ensure guests and employees are safe. By including a verification step in the cleaning process, you can ensure that rooms have been cleaned and gauge the quality of the sanitation process.

The novaLUM II-X system and PocketSwab Plus are simple to use and deliver results in 5 seconds, allowing for real-time cleaning and retesting. By implementing an ATP monitoring system with testing, hotels can use the results to improve training and cleaning procedures among housekeeping staff.

Why Use Charm ATP Tests?

At Charm Sciences, we strive to provide the hotel industry with superior sanitation monitoring, including ATP tests to detect the level of surface cleanliness. We’ve also partnered with AAA Travel to provide scientific validation that the hotel’s cleaning protocols are effective.

AAA’s trained and certified inspectors use our tests to detect traces of ATP contamination — even the lowest levels — on different high-touch surfaces in hotels. Charm’s ATP tests are now part of AAA’s Diamond Audit.

Let Charm enhance your hotel’s sanitation processes with a quality ATP monitoring system. Our tests will help you verify, quantify, and improve your facility’s cleanliness. Learn more about Charm’s ATP tests and our collaboration with AAA by contacting us today.

About Charm Sciences

Established in 1978 in Greater Boston, Charm Sciences helps protect consumers, manufacturers, and global brands from a variety of issues through the development of food safety, water quality, and environmental diagnostics tests and equipment. Selling directly and through its network of distributors, Charm’s products serve the dairy, feed and grain, food and beverage, water, healthcare, environmental, and industrial markets in more than 100 countries around the globe.

Biofilms and Their Relationship to ATP Testing

Biofilms are the unseen curse that can wreak havoc on a quality system.  They are the bane of the existence of food Quality Managers. As a Quality Manager, you create a Food Safety Plan comprised of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) that are sound, follow Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines, and actively control every critical control point and process risk in your facility.  The Plan is seamless and accounts for microbiological, chemical, and physical food hazard risks. Suppose you find a failure in the final product, such as detecting a pathogen. In that case, the entire lot is lost, and you are left doing corrective action determinations and wondering what happened. 

In the case of microbiological failures, biofilms are what has happened. A single cell, less than 0.75 microns in size, can destroy millions of dollars of product in less than twelve hours. The pervasiveness of bacteria is unequaled and complemented by bacteria’s simplicity. Evolutionarily it is awe-inspiring, but to the facility following its Food Safety Plan SOP’s to the letter, bacteria’s ability to adapt and survive harsh conditions is disheartening.

What is a Biofilm?

Bacteria are living organisms with the singular goal of reproducing. They follow the hierarchy of primal needs. They absolutely do not want to die and, because of this, develop defense mechanisms. Biofilms are microbes that are inherently sticky. They attach to other food proteins, fat, extracellular Deoxynucleic acid (DNA), and Polysaccharides on surfaces. The multiple layers of biochemicals and cells provide structure for bacterial replication and protection from cleaning chemicals and sanitizers. The result is that bacteria have adapted to create a hardened shell to human-made cleaning solutions. A single bacteria can lodge in a crack, half the diameter of a human hair, and will begin to proliferate. If left unchecked, the growing biofilm will create the protective matrix shell. And once it has a foothold, it can multiply, and displacing it becomes challenging.

Under the protection of the shell, the bacteria begin to thrive and grow. There is a point at which the pressure of the colony will become too great, and chunks will detach and flow downstream. These new colonies will either attach somewhere else in your processing plant or end up in your final product.

Bacteria and Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) Testing

ATP is the energy currency of all living matter. It’s a simple molecule used by all known forms of life, plant, fungi, prokaryote, and eukaryote microorganisms. Additionally, it has the property of activating the firefly enzyme luciferin to produce light. This property makes ATP testing the perfect medium for verifying sanitation processes and determining the effectiveness of sanitation protocols.

If you run your cleaning and sanitation cycle, test for ATP directly afterward, and get higher results than expected, you have one of two problems. Either your cleaning cycle is not working, or you have developed a residual biofilm somewhere along the line. Cleaning chemicals are designed to remove all organic matter and mineral deposits. But when biofilms form, additional scrubbing is required to break the biofilm shell and release the stuck biochemical. Without this cleaning, the following sanitizers are less effective as they don’t penetrate the biofilm shell to get at the lurking microbes/pathogens.

Further, there is generally a high-temperature cycle added to kill bacteria.  However, biofilm can prevent the heat from penetrating the lower depths of film, giving any microbe some protection. After the cleaning and final rinse, the system is assumed to be clean. But if there is a presence of ATP, residual food or biofilm is present that might circumvent the final kill step after cleaning.   

Importance of ATP Sensitivity

The light produced when ATP reacts is detected by a luminometer. ATP test swabs and luminometers are not all created equal. The PocketSwab Plus ATP Test and novaLUM II-X System are the most sensitive test and luminometer on the market. Sensitivity is vital because biofilms are detected earlier in the development process, providing early remediation and detection.  If you have biofilm, you need a system that will give you the most sensitive ATP test results to truly trace and isolate the segment where the biofilm has taken root.

Finding Solutions for Biofilm Removal

There are many options for removing hard-to-reach biofilms. Cleaners range from acid to alkali and enzymatic products to dissolve the polysaccharide shell. Turbulence in the cleaning process creates friction or scrubbing action. If a biofilm is well established, sometimes there is no substitute for system disassembly and hand scrubbing. Before choosing the best solution, you need to segment your processing system and locate the biofilm. The first step is using ATP tests at critical junctions and swabbing on a regular schedule.  A well-maintained ATP system is like a fire alarm. If there is an issue, you can immediately correct any problems. 

ATP detection done after cleaning is a proactive procedure to detect inadequate SOP that could lead to biofilm development and increased microbiological risks to food, such as short shelf-life or worse pathogens.  A sensitive ATP program is part of risk prediction and prevention essential to safe food production and brand protection under a Food Safety Plan.

How Can Charm Help?

If you wish to learn more about the Charm’s PocketSwab Plus ATP test and novaLUM II-X system, please get in touch with your local rep, or click on the link below.

About Charm Sciences

Established in 1978 in Greater Boston, Charm Sciences helps protect consumers, manufacturers, and global brands from a variety of issues through the development of food safety, water quality, and environmental diagnostics tests and equipment. Selling directly and through its network of distributors, Charm’s products serve the dairy, feed and grain, food and beverage, water, healthcare, environmental, and industrial markets in more than 100 countries around the globe.