Leafy greens Food Safety with A.I. powered Food safety.
Leafy greens Food Safety with AI Food Safety for all leafy green QC processes including packing, shipping, and leafy green supplier Food safety management. Slash Food Safety costs. Eliminate waste, price negotiations, and QC mistakes. Maximize quality consistency.
Leafy greens Supplier Food Safety & management
When Carolyn Graham ordered a garden salad at a pizza restaurant near her hometown of Loomis, Calif., on a weekday night in April 2018, she felt good about what she thought was a healthy choice.
But by the weekend, she had stomach cramps and diarrhea, which grew more severe with each passing hour. By 11 p.m. that Saturday, the diarrhea had turned bloody, and it continued all night long. Around 6 a.m. Sunday, she and her husband, Kenneth, headed to the emergency room. Doctors gave her fluids, oxygen, and an antibiotic, but Graham's symptoms didn't abate.
It took doctors three days of testing and analyzing results to determine that Graham had been infected with E. coli O157:H7, a dangerous strain of the bacteria that produce a substance called Shiga toxin. Graham, who was 72 and had been in excellent health, had developed a form of kidney failure called hemolytic uremic syndrome—a side effect that occurs in 5 to 10 percent of people who contract O157:H7.
Leafy greens Food Safetys during production
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Doctors put Graham on dialysis to help her kidneys function properly again, but she was going in and out of consciousness during her 14-day hospital stay. Her husband, one of her daughters, and a granddaughter stayed by her bedside until she was fully conscious and able to recognize the people around her. Then, her husband says, "she had to relearn how to talk, how to walk," a rehab process that took about two months before she was back to normal.
The culprit in Graham's ordeal? The romaine lettuce in that seemingly innocuous garden salad. That spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration sent out multiple national alerts, eventually telling people not to eat romaine from the Yuma, Ariz., area. Graham, it turned out, was one of 240 people across 37 states in the U.S. that spring who government officials say became sick from tainted romaine. It was the largest national E. coli O157:H7 outbreak in more than 20 years: Almost half of those affected were hospitalized, and five people from four states died. Then, right before Thanksgiving that same year, supermarkets and restaurants pulled romaine from their shelves and menus after federal officials announced yet another E. coli outbreak.
Leafy greens Food safety & management
Pathogen contamination, cross-contamination, and proliferation are major issues and thus have been the focus of our studies. Our seminal research identified an important yet overlooked food safety risk factor during fresh-cut produce wash operations: pathogen cross-contamination. In general, the produce wash process is designed to remove and kill harmful bacteria (if present). However, if not controlled well, this process can instead cause significant spread of bacteria from contaminated to previously uncontaminated produce.
The key is to ensure that enough antimicrobial agent or sanitizer is present in the wash water, but finding the right sanitizer concentration – minimal but effective – is easier said than done. To make sure it is effective and practical, we had to balance many factors, including sanitizer dose-time response for pathogen inactivation, water and chemical usage, process throughput, chlorine disinfection byproduct, wastewater disposal, product quality, and production cost, etc.
UM – Have you shared this research with the fresh-cut leafy green industry, and how have they responded?
YL – Yes, and the industry considered our studies as "groundbreaking." The follow up joint effort with FDA and the industry created industry guidelines to prevent pathogen cross-contamination and spread during leafy green wash operations ( https://www.producefoodsafety.org/publications). We recommended 10 parts per million (ppm) free chlorine with pH levels maintained around 5.5 and 7.0, if possible. Increasing chlorine concentration above 10 ppm free chlorine will certainly be more effective at preventing pathogen cross-contamination but not all processors can achieve it.
Daily Leafy greens packhouse hygiene checklist
We worked closely with the industry in developing and validating technologies for a better process control, and for improved pathogen reduction. The industry made huge strides in food safety over the past decade, ever since the 2006 E.coli O157:H7 outbreak involving baby spinach. In recent years, a lot of effort has been placed on prevention of pathogen contamination, and it has resulted in stricter farming practices, better farm worker training, industry-wide food safety standards, supply chain joint efforts to improve food safety, and industry-sponsored research initiatives.
UM – Some processors or food service operators prepare their produce by washing followed by disinfection. Do they need to use sanitizer if their intention is to "wash" not "disinfect" produce?
YL – Yes. Bacteria do not care about washing vs. disinfection. When you submerge a piece of contaminated produce in water, some bacteria will be washed off from produce surface. Without sanitizer, they will survive in water and reattach to previously clean and uncontaminated produce, causing wider spread of bacteria and food safety problems. Once that happens, subsequent disinfection cannot undo this contamination. When submerging lettuce in water during washing, there must be adequate sanitizer present in the water, even if the intention is to "wash" not "disinfect." This is especially important when you handle a large quantity of lettuce.