Logistics
Common understanding of food safety
By Carol Barnao
It’s not often that New Zealand gets a mention in United States White House reports.
The December 2011 report to President Obama from the President’s Food Safety Working Group outlines ground-breaking work that has been taking place between American and New Zealand food safety officials on a comparability agreement that will ultimately make it easier for our food producers to get their product into the US market.
The notion of comparability is based on countries recognising that producing safe food can be achieved in various ways. It challenges the way the world has traditionally done exports, where countries have demanded that exporters produce products according to the standards the importing countries’ producers are governed by – no matter the level of detail or importance these standards have in the overall delivery of safe food.
This new way of thinking recognises that an importing country’s borders cannot be its first line of defense against products that do not meet its requirements for safety and suitability, because it’s impossible to catch all bad products. Rather than border testing, regulators and importers alike want assurances that food safety measures have been built in at the point of production or manufacture of the imported products, and they want to know these systems have been credibly audited.
Essentially, comparability is about two countries with equivalent food safety systems agreeing that – for a range of products – they won’t necessarily be interested in the nitty gritty of individual food safety standards. Instead they will rely on assurances that each country can provide safe food through its overall programme, including testing and inspection.
Once a country’s food safety system is deemed comparable, the importing country would no longer need to focus so much attention on carrying out inspections in the country where food is produced, or carry out extensive sampling of product coming across the border. They will have faith in the exporting country’s systems to have ensured the food is safe and suitable.
Needless to say, in order for countries to work out comparability agreements, there has to be a high degree of trust and an absolute understanding that you and your trading partner are on the same page in terms of your food safety aims and expectations.
A huge amount of work goes ahead of signing a comparability agreement, including in-country validation of the exporting country’s regulatory systems. In the case of our work with the Americans for example, in one calendar year the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) officials spent the equivalent of 90 working days here looking at our production plants, cold store facilities, verifiers, accreditation authorities and so on.
They like what they have seen and I’m hopeful the signing of an agreement is not too far off.
I believe that the USFDA selected New Zealand as the first country to work with on a comparability agreement because we have a robust export system. Their decision also reflects the fact that we are easy to work with. Thanks to this work, we are well ahead of the Americans’ work with other trading partners.
Comparability agreements will be very important for MAF to help us achieve one of the key goal’s of our new strategy, which is to maximise export opportunities by removing unnecessary barriers to trade. The reality is that there are substantial tangible benefits to exporters, whose products are ‘green laned’ and as such reach their destination without much inspection along the way.
Carol Barnao is a member of the FOODtechnology Advisory Panel and deputy director-general of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Standards branch. Before this, she was NZFSA director of the Assurances and Standards Group which provides assurances that New Zealand food and related
products are safe and suitable to eat. Carol has a strong background in the dairy industry. Before joining MAF 12 years ago, she was for 18 years involved in the dairy industry. She has held various positions with the New Zealand Dairy Board. She is a food technologist and a fellow of the New Zealand Institute of Food Science and Technology.
If you have questions for Ms Barnao or suggestions on areas of interest in her specialist area, e-mail editor Mike Bishara at mike [at] hayleymedia [dot] com, reference Carol Barnao.
Refrigeration technology a CO2 game changer
New software being installed in Maersk Line’s entire refrigerated (reefer) container fleet will cut CO2 emissions by up to 65 percent, compared to a traditional reefer container. That will drop the company’s fleet’s emissions by 500,000 tons every year.
Maersk Line’s New Zealand trade and marketing manager, David Gulik, says the innovation would revolutionise the way reefer containers are kept cool.
Traditional container cooling systems focus on the air temperature in the container. They keep up a constant air flow and temperature at all times. This means air, heating and cooling are often run at excessive levels, resulting in unnecessary energy consumption, carbon emissions and costs.
The new technology focuses, instead, on maintaining the exact desired cargo temperature. It constantly adjusts air, heating and cooling to optimum levels.
Consequently, it uses much less energy, less CO2 emissions and lower operating costs.
Mr Gulik says that while container shipping is by far the most environmentally efficient way to transport goods over long distances, this innovation was a game changer for the entire transportation chain.
“It’s a boon for the lines, but truck and train companies and terminal operators will also see their power bills and CO2 emissions go down.”
Dubbed QUESTII (Quality and Energy efficiency in Storage and Transport), the new software is the result of a three-year development project sponsored by the Dutch government.
It was driven by Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands and Maersk Line has been involved from the beginning.
The system’s efficiency, and the impact it has on maintaining product quality during shipping, was tested first in laboratories and then on hundreds of live trial shipments. Maersk customers have been involved as development partners on a broad range of chilled products.
The results have been very successful.
Leading New Zealand meat exporter, Alliance Group, has done several trial shipments using Maersk Line’s QUESTII containers.
Development services manager Gary Maclennan is very happy with the result. He says the new technology fits well with the company’s focus to reduce their environmental impact from “farm to fork”.
“QUESTII should deliver an improved cold chain for our high value chilled products, whilst also significantly reducing energy usage during shipping. This will have a positive impact on the CO2 footprint of Alliance products into our many markets around the world,” he says.
Mr Gulik adds that eco-efficiency and environmental sustainability are important to many of Maersk’s customers, and are central to Maersk’s own business strategy.
“We aim to make containerised transportation even more environmentally friendly and cost efficient. That’s the reason why we are involved in development projects, such as QUESTII, to protect the environment,” he says.
Utilising data to optimum effect
The Belfast production team behind Baileys Original Irish Cream, the world famous liqueur which blends whiskey with cream, has increased its overall line efficiency rating from 53 percent to 69 percent.
The increase in efficiency has been achieved with the aid of relevant modules from Krones’ MES software package.
The Baileys Global Supply production facility in Belfast is part of the Diageo Group, the world’s leading supplier of premium brands. Diageo utilises all possible options for upgrading line efficiency.
“As part of our goal to become a world class operation we are always looking to achieve best practice in efficiency, it’s essential to identify the scope for optimisation within our lines,” is how engineering manager Manus Rogan explains the approach.
The starting point for Diageo’s optimisation initiatives was the need to compare the key ratios for all 80 production facilities worldwide.
Krones is represented at the production plant in Belfast with a complete line delivered in 2002/2003.
Rated at 24,000 bph, the line features an Isofill VV CIP vacuum filler with 108 filling valves and a Variojet rinser, plus Checkmat inspection units, a Taxomatic labeller for tax strips, together with packaging and cartoning machinery and palletiser and depalletiser.
The scope of delivery incorporated an LDS package – the Krones Line Documentation System, which records production data at all relevant points along the line.
To meet the stipulated requirement for group-wide efficiency depiction, the LDS integrated in Belfast – like all the available documentation systems at other facilities – was tested as part of a line diagnostic process instigated by Diageo and proved highly valuable.
“With this outcome, we were able to give Krones the green light for upgrading the LDS system so as to ensure that the group-wide efficiency measures can be determined, analysed and compared. In an internal workshop, involving the production facilities’ senior managers, we had already firmed up the detailed requirements and statements regarding the ratios concerned, so that the new analytical tools were 100 percent matched to the methods of calculation used across DiageoGlobal Supply,” says Mr Rogan.
“We wanted to get more precise information on downtimes and be able to compare between different shifts. We needed to differentiate between technically and organisationally generated downtime so as to pinpoint the time-stealers more effectively. We were particularly keen to ensure that the staff working on the line could quickly and accurately tag and identify on the system the cause of a stoppage from predefined malfunction lists.”
A classic task for the OEE module from the Krones MES software package, with all the analytical tools, is identifying the causes of any malfunctions using the data from the LDS, the software breaks down the standstill times by the criteria laid down by Diageo.
Detailed particulars of the organisationally derived downtimes, are now specified with significantly enhanced accuracy. They are supplemented by information on downtimes with technical causes.
Using the selection menu for identifying the time-stealers enables staff to identify from 10 possible causes of a malfunction using fast clicks on a PC directly at the filler. These are complemented by “free-text” areas, which permit additional descriptions of malfunction sources. This involvement of staff ensures a superlative quality of data.
“In team meetings, we now compare the target times with the actual ones. This gives us daily and weekly assessments of the line’s performance, which not only offers an option for prioritising maintenance work in a weekly maintenance plan, but also helps us to continuously improve the efficacy of our operations,” says Mr Rogan.
Since the ratio-based line monitoring system was upgraded, featuring Krones’ OEE tool, line efficiency has been upped by 16 percent within two years.
“We’re very pleased that we’ve made such substantial progress using this software along with the actions derived from it. In Diageo’s internal performance awards for 2010, Baileys won the ‘Diageo Plant of the Year Award’,” says Mr Rogan.
“There are still lots of opportunities we can tap into when it comes to line efficiency. We shall be rigorously pursuing this, and the data LDS provides is key to unlocking these,” he says.
The IT development people at Krones have now synergised all the tools used for determining and monitoring line effectiveness in a single compact software product.
The Line Performance Analyser (LPA) incorporates classic OEE evaluation with analyses of key statistics, and additionally provides order and shift referencing.
The LPA can be introduced as a stand-alone version or integrated into an existing LDS.
The gentlest way from point A to point B if you are a fish or a vegetable
By Les Watkins
Because of its delicate handling ability the Hidrostal pump is used for food transportation such as fish or vegetables. It is equally able to cope with very different applications like pumping sewage or high consitency materials. The construction of the screw centrifugal impeller prevents clogging of even large solids.
An ingenious pump for harvesting fish, designed to protect them from damage while being hauled from the water, is proving an asset to a surprising variety of food manufacturers.
The Hidrostal screw centrifugal impeller pump incorporates a design first commissioned in the 1960s to transfer fish in South America.
Now it is used extensively for that task, particularly in the UK, but its versatile potential is also recognised by others in the food and beverage industries.
For instance, it is proving ideal for pumping ingredients such as haricot beans, fresh mushrooms and mung beans as well as citrus fruits.
“And there are so many others ingredients which it can handle splendidly that I’m confident it will soon be accepted as invaluable throughout New Zealand,” says applications engineer Dennis Lewis of Pump Engineers NZ of Penrose.
“Although it is already quite widely used in this country - to clear away offal, chicken feathers and other waste - it hasn’t yet really taken off here in the business of food processing. But I’m confident that is about to happen.”
Dave Fuller, manager of Exmoor Trout Farm, is among the many UK users delighted with the Hidrostal pump.
In addition to supplying nearly a million fry to other fish farms, his North Devon operation annually produces 100 tons of prime trout. Quality is of paramount importance as his customers include top stores including Harrods of London.
“We will recover the capital outlay of the pump and grading table within two years even through we are a relatively small operation,” says Mr Fuller.
“ Without this equipment I’d need six additional people to grade and load the fish. The pump is very efficient and the fish are damage free.”
The secret of the pump’s success is in the design of the impeller. The blade’s entrance edge has a low angle and extends in the direction of the fluid stream to the rotating centre. As the fish approach the blade they are guided gently away without damage towards the impeller centre.
With a large curvature blade and low energy gradients, the streamlines remain uniform throughout the impeller. This results in a smooth low-velocity, eddy-free flow into a casing with large radial clearances.
Managers of a food factory at Wigan were equally satisfied with a series of pumps installed for the transfer of dried beans from storage areas and during the initial blanching process before they were transformed into Heinz baked beans.
So were managers at a Gloucestershire factory who needed to pump fresh bean sprouts - mung - 100 metres from the growing floor to the packing area.
The immediate benefits they reported included improved product quality and a reduction in wastage.
“They were also pleased that the maintenance costs are virtually non-existent,” says Mr. Lewis.
“It was the same with fresh-fruit manufacturers in the north of England. They needed an alternative to their costly truck method for moving up to 20 tons of citrus fruit an hour the 50 metres or more from the storage area to the juicers.
“Reliability was essential because the factory is operational for at least 10 hours a day six days a week. They’re completely satisfied that they have that reliability with their Hidrostal pump.
“Overseas there have been so many successful variations of that sort of success that these pumps will certainly be an equally big hit with food processors in New Zealand.”
For more information:
Tel: 09 571 3131
Visit: www.pumpengineers.co.nz
Email Murray [at] pumpengineers [dot] co [dot] nz