Food Safety Audits - Observations to ignore, admit or contest:

This blog post has been moved to the author's eBook.

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Sector Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection

Ready-to-Eat Meat HACCP and Candid Candice

This blog post has been moved to the author's eBook.

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Sector Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection

Food Safety Enthusiasm

Who do you think is most or least enthusiastic about their engagement in food safety matters today?
You may add your suggestions or pick from this list: 

• Growers
• Manufacturers/processors
• Wholesale and retail outlets
• Food service and restaurant operators
• Consumers
• Food Safety Scheme owners
• Food safety auditors
• Food safety auditing companies
• Regulators
• Food safety educators
• Veteran food industry professionals
• Food-borne illness litigation lawyers
• Fresh graduates from food science or food technology programs
  

Please provide some reasons for your choice or suggestions.

You may add yours or view Previous Comments 

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Sector Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection

Evidence of a Shameful Social Responsibility Failure – Food Recalls

This blog post has been moved to the author's eBook.

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection

A Question about HACCP Ownership:

Is HACCP a public domain concept as I have always believed or is anyone able to confirm otherwise that the concept is actually owned by a particular body? I will be glad to know.

Narratives about the history of HACCP includes how the concept was pioneered in the 1960s by the Pillsbury Company, the United States Army and the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a collaborative development for the production of safe foods for the United States space program. According to the introduction to HACCP published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), (Publication 22376, W8088, AG, AGN, FAO Agricultural Policy and Economic Development Series, Version 4, (1998) Section 3), Pillsbury presented the HACCP concept publicly at a conference for food protection in 1971.

So who actually owns HACCP? To put this question more practically, are companies wishing to set up programs according to HACCP principles required to pay any body for the use of the concept? 

Further to the above questions, when did the practice of HACCP principles begin?

According to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, the root word for "harzard" was first used in the 1300s, from old French hasard, hasart – meaning "game of chance played with dice," possibly from Spanish azar "an unfortunate card or throw at dice," which is said to be from Arabic az-zahr.  The sense of the word was said to have been first recorded in the 1540s in English in reference to a sense of "chance of loss or harm, risk".

So, well before the 1960s, the root word for “hazard” was used to describe risk or harm much in the same way as we do today. Given the natural human reactions to risk and harm, it can be accurately presumed that some strategies were devised to avoid such risk or harm. In particular, where games were involved, strategies were devised to mitigate “risk”, at least the risk of losing a game. Reactions to hazard through the adoption of modern HACCP principles do not seem to be different. Hazard mitigation strategies or controls remain the expected reactions to identified hazards – much like the way we practice the HACCP principles today. The practice began well before the 1960s. It only became more refined in the industrialized world. Even today, some less refined and less rigorously documented methods of practicing hazard mitigation principles continue in the lives of almost all thinking human beings.      

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection

Demystifying Food Safety Assurance

This blog post has been moved to the author's eBook.

Posted by Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is currently the chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection, and a sworn SSQA advocate.

The World’s Most Expensive Coffee – An example of how low things can go in our “civilized” world:

Who can fault those comments posted in response to the referenced article? The author meant well in sharing the Civet coffee fraud-busting science although the premise was reversely stated that: “Kopi Luwak, which is Indonesian for civet coffee, can cost up to £51 a cup and is often substituted for cheaper beans.” 

I suspect the author meant to say that cheaper beans are substituted for the more expensive Kopi Luwak coffee. That aside, and even without attention to the somewhat juvenile term used to describe the source association of the coffee bean, this article reveals a great deal about how low things can go. First of all, an authentication test is needed because opportunists have resorted to the fraudulent practice of selling fake coffee as “Kopi Luwak”. That’s one side of the folly.

Now to the other side of the folly: In a world where too many people are unable to afford real food, people are actually willing to pay that much (£51 per cup) for coffee? People are actually paying that much money for a flavor that is not sufficiently discernible so as to immediately detect the fake? Unless there are direct, significant and immediate health benefits associated with this coffee, anyone paying that much money for it or any other beverage, for that matter, has money but no . . .   fill in the blanks. I can definitely say that I’ll never regret not tasting the Kopi Luwak if it must be sold at that price range. Even if a generous philanthropist who is too rich to care wants to buy a cup for me, I’d rather have a regular priced coffee. With the already assorted varieties and flavors of coffee to choose from at a much lower price, I’ll never feel deprived. In fact I feel privileged and sometimes ashamed that I can afford to buy regular price coffee when so many people elsewhere go for days without food.

Finally to the fraudsters: If you are able to mimic the Kopi Luwak flavor so that it takes a scientific test to detect the difference, you have done well. However, you have the worst failing grade in trying to defraud people into thinking that they are buying Kopi Luwak. As long as the imitation process has not made your product unsafe, why not position and sell it as an authentic imitation? You You may borrow a page about complete honesty from these entrepreneur artists: Fake Banksy Prints Sell Out at Central Park Sale, TIME.com - http://entertainment.time.com/2013/10/21/fake-banksy-prints-sell-out-at-central-park-sale/#ixzz2jz8rGjh7

Reference:

"Test to prove the world’s most expensive coffee really has come from civet poo:" 

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent,  22 Aug 2013

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection.