Food Safety: Definitions, Hygiene, and Best Practices
Food: Any substance consumed in a natural or semi-processed state for human consumption, including beverages and any substance used in its preparation or treatment.
Food Security: Assurance that food will not cause harm to the consumer when prepared and/or consumed according to its intended use.
Sanitation: Maintenance of hygienic and healthy conditions.
Formal Definition: The process of creating conditions that promote healthy food production.
Safety: Guaranteeing that food will not cause harm to the consumer when prepared and/or consumed in accordance with its intended use.
- Safety: Ensure that food is safe to consume, free of disease-causing agents.
- Quality: Making food palatable to consume, with good flavor, color, and texture.
Pollution: Defined as the presence of an unwanted substance that can affect the safety and/or quality of food.
Food Safe: Will not cause any illness or injury to the person consuming it.
Food Hygiene: All conditions and measures necessary to ensure the safety and suitability of food at all stages of the food chain (WHO).
Food Hygiene (WHO): Food hygiene includes all measures necessary to ensure the health safety of food, while maintaining the other qualities that are proper, with particular attention to nutritional content.
Food Chain: Ranges from the field and primary production through the development, manufacture, processing, packaging, storage, transportation, distribution, sale, or supply of food or food products to consumers.
GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices): Address sanitation in manufacturing, processing, packaging, and food provision. They set ground rules for the sanitation of food establishments and are the necessary procedures to ensure safe, healthy, and wholesome food.
BPA: Actions involved in the production, processing, and transport of food products from agriculture and livestock, aimed at ensuring the protection of hygiene and human health and the environment through ecologically safer methods, hygienically acceptable, and economically feasible.
- Improving productivity in the medium and long term, as some of its components improve the knowledge of the production system.
- Allows the producer to be prepared for export to demanding markets.
Danger: Physical, chemical, or biological hazard present in the food or the condition in which it is found, provided that it poses or may cause an adverse health effect.
Surface in Contact with Food: Surfaces that contact human food and those surfaces from which drainage occurs into food or onto surfaces that contact food, usually during the normal course of operations (processing).
Vehicle: Elements that transfer bacteria into food.
Cross Contamination: Transfer of chemical or biological pollutants to food products from raw food, food handlers, or the environment.
Biofilm: Accumulation of bacterial cells immobilized on a surface and often embedded in a matrix of bacterial origin.
Disinfectants and Cleaning
Ideal Disinfectant: Inactivation resistant, broad spectrum (kills pathogens), not poisonous (or toxic), pervasive (for pathogens), no damage or alteration to inert materials, storage stable, and easy to use.
Phenol Coefficient: Compares the efficiency of a disinfectant to that of phenol, with greater efficiency indicated by a coefficient > 1. Salmonella typhi and Staphylococcus aureus are habitually used for completing the coefficients.
Detection of ATP: No reaction system works well with luciferase in vitro. If the system has a sufficient quantity of luciferin and luciferase, the luminescence intensity depends on the concentration of ATP. The ATP detection procedure to check the cleanliness of equipment surfaces is based on:
- Rubbing the area being examined with a swab.
- Dispersing absorbed substances by wetting and shaking the swab in a special tube.
- Detecting ATP using the luciferase reaction in a luminometer.
Cleaning Procedures
CIP (Cleaning in Place): Clean without dismantling or disassembling the equipment, often carried out by a specific computer. Used for relatively simple structures, such as pipelines for liquid foods and beverages.
COP (Cleaning Out of Place): Cleaning after removing and disassembling the equipment, usually done manually.