To protect consumers with food allergies, your brand reputation and your bottom line, effective food allergen management is essential.
When it comes to developing an effective food allergen management system, some key considerations for this should include, but are not limited to equipment, segregation, cleaning and training. Here we focus on training.
Just as with all areas of food safety, we must ensure that well-trained, well-intentioned people are working directly on activities relating to managing food allergens.
Within any food processing environment, personnel and their protective clothing can unintentionally act as allergen cross-contact vectors. So, it is essential that all personnel are well-trained in, and adhere to, best practice processes and procedures.
Any training should also facilitate awareness and competence in taking active steps to avoid food allergen cross-contact, and should cover other aspects of allergen management (for example, ensuring that correct labels are applied to every product).
Key training areas include – food allergen control, food allergen cleaning validation, and food allergen communication and labelling.
Food allergen control
Food safety professionals need to understand the principles and strategies of assessing and controlling food allergen risks, and how these relate to the development of food safety management systems within organisations and their suppliers.
The assessment and control of food allergen risks throughout the food chain have become a requirement of many standards, and are needed to protect consumers and prevent product recall or withdrawal.
Check out our training course on food allergen control.
Food allergen cleaning validation and analysis
Cleaning to remove allergens needs to be effective and repeatable, and its effectiveness at removing relevant allergens must be validated and verified.
Individuals involved in cleaning validations need to understand the scientific principles and techniques underpinning the validation and verification of allergen cleaning as a control within food allergen management systems. This is particularly important for those involved in the design, implementation, review and audit of food allergen cleaning validations, as well as those responsible for analysis or for liaising with the laboratories carrying out their testing.
When selecting a food allergen test, you need to understand what you are testing for, why that specific test is being done, and on what type of sample. With so many different food allergen tests available, it can be daunting to select the most appropriate option. What’s more, inherent limitations of the methodology can make it more challenging.
The right training can give you the necessary insight into key analytical methods within allergen testing, practical insight into the consideration of data, and knowledge of how best food businesses can work in partnership with laboratories to inform allergen control practices and protect consumers.
Check out our training course on food allergen cleaning validation and analysis.
