The Significance of Food Safety and Sanitation

Sanitation and food safety play an important role in preventing diseases and death, improving environmental health, and preventing food contamination.

FREMONT, CA: In order to prevent foodborne illnesses, food safety involves how food is handled, prepared, and stored. Foodborne disease outbreaks occur when two or more cases of a similar illness are caused by the consumption of the same food.

Food usually travels from one place to another. During food transportation from farm to factory to fork, food can become contaminated. A safe food handling process and procedures must be executed at every stage of the food production life cycle in order to restrict any risks. Controlling and preventing consumer harm through food safety is necessary.

The field of food safety draws on many academic disciplines, including chemistry, microbiology, and engineering. Each of these fields intersects to ensure food safety at different levels of food production, food sourcing, manufacturing units, and retail food stores. Thus, food safety is a systemic approach to hygiene, sanitation, and accountability affecting every aspect of global food production.

Sanitation: What is it?

In order to mitigate the risk of foodborne illnesses, food sanitation involves creating and maintaining conditions that prevent food contamination. The fundamental principle of food-service sanitation is absolute cleanliness, which begins with personal hygiene and safe food handling. In food production or preparation, food sanitation ensures the cleanliness and maintenance of equipment and facilities, as well as the use of hygiene practices by food handlers.

During food processing, both food safety and sanitation are included in a food safety management system, which follows a set of procedures to ensure quality control and compliance with international standards and regulations set by the state and federal governments. Overall, the system is designed to prevent any health hazards associated with the food products being sold to customers.

The significance of food safety and sanitation: Food service operators can grow their businesses and market share by implementing a food safety system. It is legally advisable for people working with food, but not in managerial roles, to understand food sanitation. It depends on the specific duties assigned to them and their involvement in food preparation, and how much knowledge they need. Foodborne illnesses are estimated to sicken 1 in 6 Americans each year, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Approximately 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths result from these illnesses each year.

An efficient food safety and sanitation system ensures the following benefits:

• Recalls and returns of food products are less frequent.
• Relationships with customers that are trustworthy.
• Facilitates ISO 22000 certification.
• Food law compliance.
• System of public health that is better.
• Healthier environment.

The Similarities between food safety and sanitation include the following:

The end goal of a food safety system and following proper food sanitation or hygiene is to mitigate any risk of foodborne illnesses in the processing of food. In addition to specifications and procedures, food safety also includes food sanitation, ensuring that consumers receive a food product that is safe to eat and free of health hazards. The Food And Drug Administration (FDA) of the USA, citing the Encyclopedia of Food Safety, 2014, talks about some of the main factors leading to foodborne diseases that are noted below,

• Unsafe food
• Cooking that is inadequate
• Too high or too low temperatures
• Cross-contamination and contaminated equipment
• Hygiene problems

Each of these issues could be handled well if food service employees had a proper understanding of food safety and sanitation. An outbreak of norovirus infection in Denmark in 2005 was associated with one large batch of frozen raspberries produced on several small-scale farms in Poland, according to the FDA. In this case, foodborne pathogens have not been inactivated by processing.