Food safety will be improved by enforcing, rather than changing, legislation on Listeria monocytogenes (Lm) in ready-to-eat (RTE) products, the Chilled Food Association (CFA) has claimed.
Its comments fly in the face of Codex Alimentarius proposals to amend the law to zero tolerance throughout shelf-life. Current EU legislation states products must either have an absence of Lm in 25g or comply with a limit of 100 colony forming units per gram (cfu/g) throughout their shelf-life. And the food industry has claimed that a proposal of zero Lm tolerance throughout shelf-life is not feasible.
“All we have is an enforcement problem,” says CFA secretary general Kaarin Goodburn. “We’ve told the Food Standards Agency and the European Commission (EC) that if you enforce rules, you assure good control. But the EC doesn’t have feedback on how its [legislation is] being enforced.”
She also criticised the EC central reference lab’s recently published guidance on durability testing, which aims to help manufacturers work out a product’s shelf-life, for being too lengthy and complicated. “The people dealing with this (Lm) won’t want to read 37 pages and mathematical formulas. It [working out shelf-life] is much more simple than this. If the listeria level in your product is over 100cfu/g before the product’s shelf-life runs out, then you’ve given the product too long a shelf-life.”
Goodburn claimed companies should already be working out a product’s shelf-life as part of the legal requirement of hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP). But she said that while the UK was overseeing HACCP, other countries didn’t seem to be. “We’ve given the European Commission hard data,” she said. “I can’t find data in any other country showing the monitoring of HACCP - it’s been silence so far.”
The European Commission’s (EC’s) Microbiological Criteria Working Group met last Friday to discuss a number of papers on Lm in RTE foods. The outcome of the meeting has yet to be announced.
A week-long Codex Alimentarius meeting in May is expected to take the issue forward.