Control of environmental pathogens

The HACCP plan has been a legal requirement in the food industry for many years. In addition, auto-control guides and GFSI standards reinforce the food safety system. But despite all these systems, food safety problems continue to crop up regularly at production sites. Increasingly, house strains, also known as persistent strains, are being discovered. These strains are difficult to get rid of, and must be monitored with care and expertise. Advanced analytical techniques such as whole genome sequencing (WGS) can be used to further examine the DNA of pathogens. Through this technique, foodborne outbreaks can increasingly be linked to farms, but this presents an additional challenge for the food industry....

To mitigate the current issues regarding domestic strains, the Federal Agency for Food Safety (FASFC) has developed a guide in collaboration with FEVIA, UGent and ILVO. This additional module GM 4 environmental pathogens is a mandatory addition to the already existing auto-control guides and will be co-audited during the audit starting March 7, 2025. Time for implementation.

Better prevention than cure

The guide describes requirements that not only focus on compliance with microbiological criteria in the final product, but now also address the production environment. In addition, the guide provides clarification on how to improve microbiological control in a food company. To do so, the FASFC suggests implementing a combination of preventive measures and environmental monitoring.

Preventive measures

The preventive measures focus on good hygiene and production practices and basic condition programs to prevent cross-contamination from the production environment to the foodstuff. To facilitate the implementation of these preventive measures, some guidelines are also shared such as:

• Creating a risk matrix and decision tree to estimate the level of risk regarding activities and type of processes.
• Dividing ven the farm into hygiene zones: high, low, basic and product-free.

In addition to an elaborated procedure, the GM4 module also requires a risk-based plan to be implemented in the quality system. This requires additional requirements regarding the basic prerequisite program with the goal of improving food safety.

Environmental Monitoring

For well-founded and effective environmental monitoring, based on a logically developed sample naming plan (e.g., frequency, number, rotation and timing of sample naming) with corrective actions, the risk-based approach forms the basis. For this, good business knowledge and trend analysis of historical data are essential. Furthermore, it is important to keep evaluating and improving as a review of the monitoring plan is required at least every 3 years.

Detailed examples of the environmental monitor can be found in the FASFC report on the GM4 module (page 45).

Questions or need support?

Précon can help you with different aspects, such as drafting the prevention measures, designing the environmental monitoring plan or with the practical roll-out of the whole system.
You can also follow an in-depth training on microbiological analyses and the analysis plan where the analysis plan and microbiological results are critically examined. After all, proper processing of these results in combination with a good analysis plan ensures early detection of contamination so that an adequate response can be made.

Contact
Need help implementing the module in your quality system or have questions about environmental pathogens in your organization? Please contact us at +32 (0)3 616 08 69 or email info@precongroup.com.