Today’s post is a story that I heard from a colleague about a vegetable processing plant that became infected with salmonella and e. coli.

Please understand that this is a major international company and it is for this reason that I cannot disclose any names in the content of this article. This particular plant buys vegetables of all sorts directly from large farms and after grading, cleaning and sorting the vegetables are frozen and packed for the consumer and institutional markets.

The company in question works with just two or three trucking companies which bring the raw materials to the plant and deliver shipments of finished product to the local and foreign markets. Good relationships had been established with the trucking companies which included both the haulage companies and the factory itself helping each other out as much as possible as a matter of course. This factory had the best weigh bridge in the area and one of the favors that was performed on an ongoing basis was to weigh trucks of the said three companies even though the payload of the trucks had nothing to do with the business of the factory.

Complaints had been arriving at the factory’s quality control department stating that their products had tested positive for salmonella and e.coli. The factory checked all of their production lines to check that everything was working as it should and indeed no faults were found inside the factory itself.

A decision was taken to bring in an expert in the area of HACCP’s. and indeed it took him a mere five minutes to discover the source of the problem. Many different types of trucks were coming in to be weighed. Among them were trucks hauling the following cargoes: cages for chickens and turkeys being shipped from farms to slaughter houses, deep litter from dairy farms and poultry farms, various types of manure, and soil.

Trucks carrying these loads often waited for quite some time alongside trucks hauling vegetables for the factory itself. Dust and spray that inevitably flew from one truck to another was enough to cause the cross contamination of the vegetables with whatever the other truck was hauling.. This was a very basic and critical flaw in the work procedures and food hygiene standards of this particular factory. This situation was more than enough to cause this food hygiene crisis for this particular factory.

A decision was instantly taken to stop the weighbridge service to all trucks not carrying vegetables specifically for the plant. In this particular case, good intentions led to a very bad result.

A new scheme is being implemented in the UK that will give consumers the opportunity to evaluate food hygiene standards in restaurants that they might be thinking of visiting.

Until now, information about food outlet businesses has not been privy to the general public. Authorities preferred to keep this information classified and under strict lock and key. This turn about in policy is now considered to be vital information for public “food” health & safety. The name “scores on doors” has been chosen for the scheme as scores will be given to food business and which will, hopefully, be an accurate indication to health and safety standards within any specific establishment.

 The scheme organizers also hope that this “points scored” scheme will give restaurants and other food service outlets an incentive to maintain better levels of food hygiene.

 The authority running the scheme is the FSA or the UK Food Standards Agency. Some local authorities, however, will be running their own variation of the scheme.

 The initial pilot scheme will include some 60 out of 400 local authorities within  the United Kingdom. Each of the various authorities will adopt  a different approach to the subject. It is hoped that by evaluating the different approaches adopted by the various authorities, the FSA will be able to judge which approach was most successful. It may, however, become clear that a variety of approaches may need to be adopted to best address the different areas of the suject of  food hygiene.

 At the end of the pilot trial it is hoped that the scheme will be adopted by all 400 local authorities within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the anual number of food poisoning cases will fall dramatically.