As convenience trumps the culinary arts in many homes, ready meals are ever more popular. Fortunately, most ready meal producers are extremely alert when it comes to the risk posed by pathogens.
“Awareness of food safety has been a constant for us, particularly as we have grown as a business,” says Cullen Allen of Cully and Sully, which outsources the production of its soups, hot pots and pies. “We've never had a food scare and obviously see safety as extremely important to our business.”
Aaron Whiteside
He says it can be difficult to balance safety concerns with the desire to make great-tasting ready meals. “Safety cooks often take away from the quality, particularly if you're working with sensitive vegetables such as peas, but they are essential,” he says.
According to Ita White, who works in food industry development at Teagasc, ready meals producers have the same safety obligations as any food business. “What has made them more newsworthy,” she says “is that there have been some recalls in that sector because of pathogens such as Listeria being found.”
In October 2013, for example, thousands of cases of ready meals made by Reser’s in the US had to be recalled due to a Listeria scare.
How ready meals are made
Ready meal manufacturing operations typically fall into one of three process types, explains Aaron Whiteside, Senior Meat & Fish Technologist at the Loughry campus of the College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise in Cookstown, Co Tyrone.
The first involves cooking and chilling of components (such as the sauce and carbohydrate) followed by the high care assembly of these along with bought-in precooked meat pieces. A typical example would be a sweet and sour chicken dish with rice.
In the second, the meat is cooked on site, either as part of the sauce, or separately. This is followed by high care assembly and packing into the primary pack. Spaghetti Bolognese is a good example.
For the third, some products such as lasagnes are assembled from cooked and uncooked components and then go through a final cooking process.
1“Across these types of operations the destruction of pathogens through the cooking process, control over the chilling process to minimise opportunities for spore germination and outgrowth, and the prevention of post-cook re-contamination represent the major areas for the management of food safety,” says Aaron.
The risks for ready meal makers
Unsurprisingly, the survival of pathogens such as Salmonella and Listeria due to inadequate cooking is the primary safety risk Aaron mentions. “Thermal processes are usually designed to reduce Listeria, which is the most heat-resistant vegetative pathogen of concern,” he says.
Aoife McGowan, Quality Control Manager at Blue Haven Foods, says Listeria is the pathogen they focus on above all. “It’s the hardest one to kill so we focus on heat treating to make sure our products are kept hot enough for long enough.”
Aaron adds that producers must be extremely cautious in ensuring there is no post-cook contamination. “Processing facilities typically include a segregated high care assembly area, with dedicated staffing resources, intensive cleaning and disinfection regimes, and environmental swabbing regimes to verify cleaning effectiveness.”
Sound operational procedures are crucial. “Overall, a sound site HACCP plan with good hazard identification and a strong risk assessment is key to managing potential hazards and adopting preventative measures to eliminate or reduce them,” he said.
Ready meal sales
Despite forecast growth in the ready meal sector for 2013, sales in the Republic of Ireland fell to below €271m last year, according to the Euromonitor Ready Meals in Ireland report published last January. This dip was attributed primarily to the horsemeat scandal.
Both frozen ready meals (8% of the market) and chilled ready meals (7%) suffered because of the horsemeat issue, but sales of chilled pizza (6%) and prepared salads (5%) actually rose in 2013.
Comments