Validation Validation Validation
Reflecting on this topic ahead of my presentation at IAFP in Salt Lake City on Tuesday 10 July (Session S39: Validation and Verification – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), it is remarkable how often we see the same predictable problems cropping up. Of course, we can deal with the problems, but we're catching them late. The current Listeria outbreak in Europe is a case in point. Catching food safety problems late means more people get sick and we waste vast amounts of food at the same time. While the presentation on Tuesday deals with process validation and verification, I will advocate a common sense approach to food safety controls with a focus on prevention rather than fire fighting. This means looking at entire systems..from farm to fork and applying incremental risk reduction all along the value chain. Sometimes we are fooling ourselves by not asking for evidence that our processes are effective. Whether it be cleaning or thermal inactivation, or a range of other processes, the underlying principles are the same. It gets ugly if we don't ask the questions. If we get into what Margaret Heffernan describes as willful blindness, then its not just ugly, its stupid as well.
Project Director at National Probiotic Laboratory-NIBGE
5 年Your article is interesting as it alludes to the situation in a lot of developing countries where the industry is averse to process validation and food safety SOPs...
Retired
6 年Great post on a critical area of food safety that is often missunderstood and sadly overlooked by some. People still need to learn that food safety doesn't end when you write the HACCP Plan. Validation and Verification is literally for life and maintains HACCP effectiveness.