Partners in Food Safety: Spoilage
August 29, 2024

Food spoilage affects the taste, color, odor, texture, or consistency of food, potentially making it unsafe for consumption and costly for food manufacturers. The spoilage of a product depends largely on its composition and sensitivity to spoilage-causing microorganisms and conditions. The factors that cause spoilage can be introduced at multiple stages of the manufacturing process. Food manufacturers use several tools and resources to combat spoilage and maintain the safety and quality of their products to minimize product loss or recall. But not every organization reacts the same way to a spoilage event.
We recently sat down with two Food Safety experts, Dr. Abby Snyder, Associate Professor of Microbial Food Safety at Cornell University, and Dr. Matt Taylor, Professor of Food Safety Microbiology at Texas A&M University, to discuss various aspects of spoilage and the impact that it has on an organization and to get their perspective on, “A spoilage event has occurred, now what?”
Impact of Spoilage
Spoilage management is important for an organization to protect public health while also bolstering the company's brand and reputation. Though public safety is always paramount in food production, maintaining the stability of products and minimizing loss is critical to the food manufacturing business.
Dr. Snyder noted, “Academic and regulatory professionals focus a lot on food safety, for obvious reasons, but the industry has always known that spoilage is critically important for consumer acceptance and brand protection. I have heard CEOs say it’s one of the things that keeps them up at night.”
Dr. Taylor added, “We've seen where customer loyalty can be, to some degree, protected by how a company deals with those issues of spoilage in terms of how it communicates with the public. One metric of success is how effectively does a company communicate to its customer base and to the general public in the midst of the event.”
There is an immediate economic impact in the event of a spoilage incident. There is the cost of the impacted product, distribution and disposal expenses, and the interruption to normal business. Additionally, there are potential longer-term impacts that can arise from a spoilage event, especially if customer loyalty and trust have been compromised. With access to data and a proactive approach, customer trust can be maintained, even when facing an adverse event.
A spoilage event will put a strain on an organization and will challenge its capabilities in collecting, sharing, and communicating data. Dr. Snyder highlighted, “The best-case scenario is one where the company already has historical data tracking and trending spoilage within their facility.”
Controlling Spoilage
Access to test result data can majorly impact an organization’s ability to address a spoilage event quickly. Dr. Snyder commented, “The categories of interventions for controlled spoilage organisms are not so revolutionary. It's supplier and ingredient quality management. It's sanitation, processing interventions, or anti-microbials. But when companies are trying to address a problem that's come up, it's often in the absence of sufficient data and so it's a lot of ‘guess and check.’ We have this issue; we're going to try this intervention and we're going to move on. We're going to try that intervention and we're going to move on. And I think always in problem-solving there, there's going to be a bit of ‘guess and check,’ but there is a lack of data to evaluate the success of different interventions, so it would be preferable if after you did an intervention, you had some sort of quantitative measure of if that was successful or not; so that you aren't just spending resources continuing to “guess and check.” Dr. Snyder expands on this topic in a recent webinar she participated in titled, “Make your Environmental Data Count.”
Spoilage-causing organisms are a constant concern for food producers. Some factors are more challenging to control than others but must still be vigorously monitored. Maintaining control of product while in transit or prior to arrival at your facility requires cooperation with suppliers and partners. Establishing open and frequent communication can positively impact your ability to monitor product conditions when out of your control and provide access to all relevant data when needed. However, when conditions are controllable, a robust sanitation program is paramount.
A sanitation program should be comprehensive and supported by well-written Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), as well as thoroughly trained staff and/or contracted employees involved in the process. Dr. Taylor added, “A company needs an environmental monitoring program. We talk a lot about pathogen environmental monitoring programs for pathogens, like Listeria monocytogenes, salmonella, and the like. However, an environmental monitoring program that incorporates very, very strong ‘seek and find’ indicator microorganisms or other types of microorganisms that are indicative of loss of microbiological hygiene is an absolute must. Those types of data might also be very applicable to understanding overall hygiene control and getting out ahead of what could be an otherwise significant spoilage loss of product.”
Keys for Preventing Spoilage
Rigorous protocols and procedures are critical to staving off spoilage issues, but it takes much more than that to become a preventative organization, according to Dr. Taylor. “Having a robust sanitation program where the processor is focused on having a strong degree of control but also has a mentality; everyone that works there has the mentality of ‘if we find it, that's a good thing.’ If we find the spoilage agent, if we find the biofilm, if we find a pathogen, it's good that we found it; because if we find it, we can now eliminate it. We can get a handle on it; we can control it. There needs to be a very vested period of time and interest where the facility leadership comes together from all the different areas of the facility, processing, QA, QC, food safety, management, operations, supply chain management, and logistics. All the major areas within a facility come together and really spend the time to do the dive into what drove this problem, what really was the root cause of this event, and thus what we can do to prevent it from happening again.”
Dr. Snyder shares that she sees an opportunity for companies to become more preventative in their spoilage management through improved data analysis. “Companies are pretty good at doing testing. They can get count data, they can get presence; absence data, and that tells them something about that product that they've tested. But if they can integrate those findings over time and do use more statistical approaches, they can see trends and patterns. And so, there's a lot of opportunity to gain more insights through that and a more quantitative framework to their data gathering.”
What advice would you offer a new food safety professional when a spoilage event occurs?
“I would ask them to think about what historical data they wish they had in the event of having to address the spoilage issue. So put yourself in that position and think about what you have, what tools you wish you would have in that situation.”, noted Dr. Snyder. She also mentioned that there are generally three categories of data used to track spoilage, including product spoilage rates, microbial counts trending, and identification and subtyping of spoilage organisms, which is becoming the best practice for most organizations. “They identify at least the species level. You could also imagine building the culture collection, keeping those organisms to go back through, or doing some kind of molecular subtyping to see if it's the same organism that's causing problems over time.”
Dr. Taylor was equally interested in data, noting, “I would tell them to ask for as much information as possible. What are the pieces of evidence of spoilage? The more evidence you can have as to the organoleptic evidence, it will help point you in the direction of the nature of spoilage. If it is a microbiologically driven form of spoilage, that's going to hopefully help point you towards what some of the sources might be of those microorganisms. What is driving this event and then, what we can do about it.”
A spoilage event is truly a bad day in the life of a food manufacturer. Gathering and collecting data was highlighted as part of the first step in managing this situation for both of our food safety experts. They both stressed the importance of being able to organize, analyze, and communicate data in successfully navigating a potentially brand-damaging spoilage event. In addition, being a transparent company — being transparent about communication — was stressed to preserve trust built over time. Finally, company culture was identified as a potential strength in controlling spoilage by encouraging the mindset of a “seek and find” approach to sanitation and environmental monitoring.
All these traits are signs of a preventative approach to spoilage management, one focused on data-driven decision-making and forward-thinking. A cloud-based solution, Neogen Analytics provides the ability to track data and alert specific people when predefined thresholds have been exceeded. To see how to use your data to minimize a spoilage event, learn more about Neogen Analytics today.
Related Content:
Webinar – Seek and Destroy Microbial Spoilage with Help from Environmental Monitoring
Category: Food Safety, Consumer Goods, Dietary Supplements, Food & Beverage, Pet Food, Allergens, Microbiology, Pathogens, Environmental Monitoring