Dairy Processing - September/October 2024 - 69

The dairy industry, and the food
manufacturers in general, following
best practices are always trying to
prevent those instances of process
cross-contamination. "
Chad Galer, Dairy Management Inc.
food safety success relies upon unrelentingly adapting and
advancing its quality assurance strategies. The Innovation
Center for US Dairy's food safety committee exists because
industry experts volunteer their time and convene to share
best practices.
" The dairy industry has always been a leader in driving
continuous improvement in food safety, " he said. " This
helps to ensure safe products for consumers and maintain
trust in dairy products by working on food safety together
as an industry. "
From Galer's vantage point, the dairy industry remains
vigilant in preventing cross-contamination in its processing
facilities. He said some focus areas key to quality assurance
are the niches and hard-to-reach spaces on equipment and
infrastructure within a plant.
To prevent cross-contamination from impacting
dairy products, he reiterated that a vigorous EMP is a
prerequisite. And to achieve peak efficacy, food safety and
quality assurance professionals need what Galer calls a
" seek and destroy " approach.
It may seem counterintuitive to the uninitiated,
but Galer explained that the best practices most dairy
processors follow expect environmental monitoring to lead
to at least a low percentage rate of detected organisms.
In fact, he said it isn't good to have a 0% monitoring hit
rate, and if a company presented to the Innovation Center
for US Dairy that it was operating at that level, the experts
would shed more light on the situation.
" No, you don't have a perfect plan, " Galer said. " You
need to dig deeper and focus on niches, hard-to-reach
places. "
A monitoring approach firing on all cylinders will detect
some low level of contamination - not on product contact
surfaces, Galer made clear, but in areas adjacent to product
contact surfaces, such as items above exposed product,
package guides, equipment legs, control panels or aprons.
RTE or high hygiene processing room floors, walls and
surfaces, and tools in those spaces, also are likely to have a
low percentage rate of identifiable contaminants.
" You want to be digging deep enough that you're finding
it, " Galer said.
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