For the fifth straight year, undeclared allergens were the leading cause of USDA recalls. Starting April 12, 2015, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) began ongoing, monthly testing and verification to determine whether facilities are accurately controlling and labeling the "Big 8" food allergens: wheat, shellfish, eggs, fish, peanuts, milk, tree nuts, and soybeans.
How Does Your Facility Measure Up?
According to FSIS, most recalls occurred due to changes in ingredient suppliers, products packed in the wrong packaging or with misprinted labels, or changes to ingredient formulation. Additionally, instances occurred when a meat or poultry product came into contact with an undeclared allergenic ingredient that was not directly added to the product. For example, a company might use a cleaning product or a non-stick coating that contains soy lecithin. In this case, soy lecithin must be declared on the label.
Our Solution
CAT²'s Labeling, Mixing, and Food Safety Quality Management (FSQM) software applications offer a fully-automated solution that eliminates the risk of employees mislabeling products or improperly mixing batches.
With the Labeling applications, plants are able to design and manage any number of master label formats, customized by product, customer, or batch run. Labels are custom-designed in a central location for quality control. As changes are needed, the updated label files can be sent electronically to the plant-floor scales in real-time, ensuring that the correct labels are being used at all times.
On the plant floor, our in-motion systems include automatic print-and-apply and label verification functions and are capable of weighing and labeling more than 30 cases per minute with no operator intervention. Our weigh-price labeling option produces labels based on product weight, and our store-and-forward technology allows each labeling station to run even when the network is down, ensuring minimum downtime and maximum throughput.
CAT²'s Mixing application enforces formulations set in a product's specification. Operators scan and weigh raw meat and other ingredients as they are added to a batch, creating traceability records and ensuring that the correct amounts of the correct ingredients are being used. The Mixing module eliminates operator errors and ensures consistency and accuracy in the mixing process.
The FSQM application allows companies to collect HACCP, food safety, quality, downtime, plant monitoring, and facility data; this would include checks related to finished products, packaging materials, and label verifications. Data can be collected using probes, sensors in existing plant-floor equipment, or by plant-floor operators using touchscreen computers or hand-held devices. If a check fails, the system can notify appropriate personnel by text message or email as well as walk the operator through corrective action steps and generate an electronic CAPA form.
Request a Demo
If you are interested in any of our solutions, our staff would be happy to set up a free demo so that you can experience our software solutions from the comfort of your own office. We can even build your information in our system so you'll be able to see exactly how your data could be managed in our software.
