VICTORIA – The added costs of improved food safety standards have been offset by longer-term benefits, says the manager of a major processing plant.Peter Stein of Piller Sausages and Delicatessens told the Canadian Meat Council’s annual meeting that recent food recalls and outbreaks of listeria, E. coli and salmonella forced his plant to look at practices that hadn’t changed for decades.“Not only does it cost money to do, it is also a change in paradigms of how we do things,” he said.Industry-wide changes and en-hanced government regulations to improve food safety were major topic.The council represents federally inspected red meat facilities.Stein said the changes required a new attitude from managers and support from employees who remembered the days when they were allowed to smoke on the processing floor and wear aprons rather than coveralls and head covers.“When you are working with food, you cannot afford to be on autopilot,” he said.“Sitting in a board room deciding on what to do is one thing, but making it happen in the plant every day as part of your program is one of the real implementations.”James Maitland of Maple Leaf Foods in Saskatoon said the changes have brought significant costs to processing plants that make ready to eat products.It costs more money to sanitize and maintain equipment, more staff may be needed, more training is required and greater laboratory costs are incurred because more swabs are taken from equipment and food each day.However, Maitland said reducing risks saves money in the long term.“It costs $5,000 a day if we put a line into quarantine, so for the extra $20 a swab, the $50,000 a year on a lab technician is worth the money,” he said.Regularly dismantling equipment for cleaning has also resulted in fewer breakdowns because trouble is spotted sooner.Equipment manufacturers are getting the message by making their products easier to clean and easier to take apart so that pathogens do not hide within the blades and mixers.Claudette Pshebniski of Santa Maria Foods in Toronto, which makes Italian deli meats, said other plant improvements have directly affected employees’ jobs and productivity.At her plant, workers are now segregated by the job so they do not carry contamination from one processing line to another.However, this can also cause communication problems.As well, production time is lost from each shift when people change their clothes and spend more time washing and cleaning up.A study at the Toronto plant found that only 6.75 hours of each eight hour shift were spent working, forcing the company to pay more overtime so jobs could be finished.Staff changes have since been made so that production lines are kept running longer and production improved.Stein said holding products until test results are received also costs money because customers may charge late fees.Another area of contention is interpreting new federal inspection guidelines.Plant managers argue there are too many grey areas subject to interpretation by individual inspectors.However, they also said their relationship with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has improved.
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