In the food industry, quality control is a top priority. When working with perishable items, extra precautions need to be taken to ensure that the final food products are not only safe for consumption, but also enjoyable.
In order to maintain regulatory standards, restaurant and grocery store owners must utilise quality management technology throughout every step of the business process, from the supply chain to the consumer.
This requires diligence, resourcefulness and, most importantly, the right equipment.
What does food safety and quality mean?
Maintaining food safety and quality means ensuring that the food products that make their way to consumers are healthy to eat and will not cause illness. The most common food-related illness consumers face is food poisoning, which affects an estimated 4.1 million Australians each year.
Many factors can affect food safety and quality, like the temperature at which it is kept, how it’s cooked, cleanliness of the food and surrounding areas and the duration that the it is stored. Some of these qualities are easy to monitor with little to no equipment, like the age of food items. Others, like the temperature of the products and the environment, require effective technology for complete and effective oversight.
Why is quality control important in the food industry?
Businesses in the food industry have a legal obligation to ensure that the products they sell to their customers are safe for consumption. While symptoms of food poisoning can be as mild as slight discomfort, they can be as serious as death.
Food poisoning can be attributed to a variety of different causes. There are many bacteria that can grow in food and cause symptoms ranging from mild to serious. The most common foodborne pathogens are salmonella, campylobacter and E. coli, all of which can occur in raw or undercooked foods and can cause death when severe.
An estimated 600 million people around the world contract a foodborne illness every year, and 420,000 of these people die as a result, according to the World Health Organisation. While some instances of unsafe food are difficult if not impossible to catch, most can be prevented or discovered through maintaining food safety standards and implementing hazard analysis.
Businesses in the food industry should comply with regulatory standards for food quality and safety because it is their moral and legal responsibility, but also so they can maintain their reputation. When a customer gets sick from food they bought at a restaurant or grocery store, news travels fast. More than one occurrence can be enough to put an organisation out of business.
How to manage food safety and quality
Food service organisations can maintain product safety and quality by following the five basic food safety processes:
- Keep clean
- Separate raw and cooked
- Cook thoroughly
- Keep food at safe temperatures
- Use safe water and raw materials
For some of these processes, businesses need the proper equipment, one of the most important being instruments for temperature control.
Temperature affects the ability for bacteria to grow. When food is left at temperatures that are warm enough, harmful bacteria can survive, grow and reproduce, often with little to no visual evidence or odor.
Oftentimes, food travels a long way before it reaches the consumer. There are many different storage vessels where the temperature needs to be monitored and maintained. For example, temperature control is important in vehicles, refrigerators, freezers and kitchens. Also, the internal temperature of the products themselves need to be checked to ensure that they are safe to consume.
Monitoring temperatures in several locations and for many different products can be a headache to track manually. Fortunately, Testo has the products to make food safety management easier.
How Testo can help
Testo has a wide range of products for businesses in the food industry to maintain regulatory standards and safety with ease.
Saveris Food Stores and testo Saveris Restaurant account for every step of the temperature measuring process. Our solutions provide high-quality sensors, which record accurate and reliable temperature data, as well as advanced software to analyse, document and store the information. Our products also come with personalised support to help with set-up, and continued assistance for operation.
The multiple components of these measurement instruments ensure that the complicated and time-consuming temperature monitoring and analysis is easier than ever, which not only saves you from a headache, but also narrows the margin for error. Restaurants, stores and gas stations often handle a large amount of products. Our technology is built for high volume projects.
Our measuring instruments for gastronomy are wide-ranging and cover a variety of needs. For example, our products for restaurants and catering allow businesses to both ensure that the refrigeration is at the appropriate temperature for food storage and that cooked dishes are heated to the proper temperature.
Additionally, our solutions for the cold chain involve the quick inspection of incoming goods, continuous temperature monitoring of storage areas, documentation of temperatures of fresh foods and the maintenance of constant low temperatures in refrigerator units.
We even have products for food production that not only measure the temperature of the cooked food, but also analyse oil quality and pH value. Many of our solutions validate pasteurization, sterilization and freeze-drying processes.
At Testo, we want to make food quality and safety management as convenient as possible, not only to save business owners from time-consuming labor, but also to limit the amount of human error and keep consumers safe.
We understand that the food industry is wide-ranging, and there are many different needs. That’s why our products come with high-tech software and are often customisable. Also, we have equipment that is stationary as well as transportable products.
No matter what kind of food service business you operate, Testo can help ensure that your products retain their safety and high quality.
Contact us today for more information.
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