Demystifying Food Safety Implementation by SMEs Using Innovative Cohort Factory Visits and 15Action-Oriented Steps to HACCP Certification

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Ensuring food safety has been a major concern to small and medium-sized food manufacturers especially those in developing countries participating in international trade. In this connection, an action-oriented learning and factory visit by a cohort of 15 owners of food manufacturing SMEs to a world-class food factory in Ghana under the auspices of Partners in Food Solutions helped demystify HACCP implementation in the minds of these SME owners. This resulted in majority of them implementing HACCP within six months. A typical indigenous Ghanaian small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) engaged in palm cream concentrate canning was selected for HACCP study and the generic HACCP system was developed which is being adapted for the entire palm cream concentrate canning industry in West Africa. To manufacture canned palm cream concentrate, fresh and ripen palm fruits are harvested, weighed, inspected, and sorted for their quality. The quality palm fruits are washed, cooked at a temperature of 100°C for 30 min, depulped into paste, fiber and kernels. The paste with the fiber is squeezed and strained to obtain palm cream. The fine cream is collected and blended with 0.5% salt and heated to a temperature ≥ 70°C for 10 min. Empty cans are washed, filled with the hot cream, seamed, washed to get rid of stains and loaded into retort baskets and then hoisted into a vertical retort for sterilization. Retorting is done at 121°C for 60 minutes and then cooled to a temperature of 40°C and the product are removed from the retort and incubated at ambient temperature for 7 days. After which labelling is done and the product are cased and palletized ready for sale. The 14 stages of HACCP implementation including the 7 preparatory steps and the 7 principles of HACCP recommended by were applied in addition to 2 innovative steps to the palm cream concentrate canning process [1]. Each processing step was correctly captured in the process flow diagram and subjected to hazard analysis to identify all potential food safety hazards that are associated with each step. The identified hazards were classified as physical, chemical or biological and subjected to risk assessment process using a quantitative scoring method to determine the likelihood and severity of each potential hazard which helped to determine significant hazards with each step. The significant hazards were then subjected to critical control point determination using the codex decision tree. Three steps of microbiological significance were identified in the process as CCPs. These are can seam (CCP #1), retorting (CPP #2) and retorted can cooling (CCP #3). Critical limits were established for these limits as follows: CCP# 1 – can seaming (body hook butting (BHB) > 75%, thickness rating (TR) > 75% and actual overlap (AO) > 1.1mm), CCP# 2 – retorting (120 -122°C for 60 minutes at a pressure of 1bar must be achieved during sterilization) and CCP# 3 – can cooling (incoming cooling water into the retort must be chlorinated to 3 - 4 ppm, residual chlorine content and after cooling, the discharge water should contain ≥ 0.5ppm residual chlorine content). Monitoring and verification procedures were developed for each CCP and corrective actions and record keeping systems have been established for the CCPs.