BluePhantom
Educator (of liberals)
So I recently took a job as a corporate manager and Quality Assurance Director of a small food manufacturing plant. We supply product to a small chain of restaurants under our own label, but we also supply product to other companies under a different label. So in other words, we supply our own restaurants but also sell product to hotels and supermarkets and other companies that...for example...take our refried beans and use them for their line of frozen TV dinners. As such, we are USDA inspected and certified. Now I have worked in food service and food related industries all my life and I have some very good news for consumers of USDA inspected products (assuming our operation is typical).
You think the health department is tough? They show up once or twice a year. USDA inspectors live in your kitchen. Hate that health inspector that raises hell because something in the fridge isn't dated? Wait until a USDA inspector shuts down your entire operation because there is a fly in the kitchen. You can't kill it. That would cause fly guts to contaminate the area. You have to catch it and "escort it out of the building". Any food it lands on must be destroyed (even if it's 200 lbs. of ground beef and the fly touched down on it for a second). After the fly is removed, a mid-shift scrub down must take place before operations can continue. A pain in the ass for us, but good news for the public.
Cleanliness? Most people don't want to see a professional kitchen. Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares doesn't lie. I always demanded a very clean kitchen (the worst health inspection I ever received was a 94 and I freaked the hell out). This place is immaculate. Scrubbed from top to bottom and the end of every shift with cleanser and sanitizing solution (takes about two hours each shift and that's three times a day). Scrub down includes the walls and behind every nook and cranny. Then the surfaces are swabbed with a kit that tests for contaminants and/or allergens. I would have no problem licking the floors after clean up.
Record keeping is so tight that if a supplier gives us contaminated product and there is a recall, we can identify every product that contaminated materiel went into and can recall it from every single customer of ours within 30 minutes (the law allows for 60 minutes). We can identify exactly who has the product, exactly what lot numbers are contaminated, and tell our customers to get them off the shelves in less than an hour.
It's a challenging job, but if this is typical of a USDA inspected food manufacturing plant, the public should feel very confident about the product they are receiving.
You think the health department is tough? They show up once or twice a year. USDA inspectors live in your kitchen. Hate that health inspector that raises hell because something in the fridge isn't dated? Wait until a USDA inspector shuts down your entire operation because there is a fly in the kitchen. You can't kill it. That would cause fly guts to contaminate the area. You have to catch it and "escort it out of the building". Any food it lands on must be destroyed (even if it's 200 lbs. of ground beef and the fly touched down on it for a second). After the fly is removed, a mid-shift scrub down must take place before operations can continue. A pain in the ass for us, but good news for the public.
Cleanliness? Most people don't want to see a professional kitchen. Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares doesn't lie. I always demanded a very clean kitchen (the worst health inspection I ever received was a 94 and I freaked the hell out). This place is immaculate. Scrubbed from top to bottom and the end of every shift with cleanser and sanitizing solution (takes about two hours each shift and that's three times a day). Scrub down includes the walls and behind every nook and cranny. Then the surfaces are swabbed with a kit that tests for contaminants and/or allergens. I would have no problem licking the floors after clean up.
Record keeping is so tight that if a supplier gives us contaminated product and there is a recall, we can identify every product that contaminated materiel went into and can recall it from every single customer of ours within 30 minutes (the law allows for 60 minutes). We can identify exactly who has the product, exactly what lot numbers are contaminated, and tell our customers to get them off the shelves in less than an hour.
It's a challenging job, but if this is typical of a USDA inspected food manufacturing plant, the public should feel very confident about the product they are receiving.
There are legal limits for what is allowed in that regard, yes, but I have a hard time seeing how such a thing could happen in the manufacturing process. Certain things could get in during the production of raw materials (such as vegetables that are contaminated at the farm where they are grown), but no way it is getting by an inspector once the raw material hits the manufacturing plant.
