The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly shifted consumer demand away from restaurants and foodservice to home meals and ready-to-eat (RTE) meat and poultry products. As a complement for more convenience-type items, consumers began focusing on product expiration dates to limit trips to retail markets. Combined with consumers' nutritional focus on sugar, sodium, fat content, and additives, meeting these expectations and requirements is a serious challenge for meat and poultry processors. The most common challenges for reformulation are reduction of sodium and replacing additives such as nitrite and preservatives.
Here we explore foodborne illness outbreak investigations related to coconuts, highlight the challenges experienced, and share the food safety lessons learned.
The challenge with all of these fresh-cut, RTE products is that they were not getting any processing step required to eliminate the hazards that may exist on the raw materials.
For ready-to-eat food processors, developing and implementing pathogen environmental monitoring programs are important parts of their sanitation controls.
There is nothing more essential to meat and poultry safety than properly cooking to destroy vegetative bacterial pathogens of concern and cooling promptly to prevent outgrowth of spore-forming bacterial pathogens.
Although snacks are one of the safest foods in the market, it is still critical to implement the necessary procedures to attain the highest level of food safety and quality.
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