CFA’s highly regarded guidance documents remain central to its work and the industry is already welcoming the latest of these: ‘Principles of an Environmental Monitoring Program for the Management of Listeria monocytogenes’. This guidance is part of a package of work led by CFA in preparation for potential changes to EU legislated Listeria monocytogenes criteria (CFA News #59). That work has now largely been published at www.chilledfood.org/listeria.
The guidance sets out effective environmental hygiene management using monitoring and preventative and corrective actions and how to interpret this data and relate it to other results from raw materials, components and product. This gives much-needed detail to support good hygiene practice, particularly for SMEs and for enforcement not only by Competent Authorities but also commercially, e.g. by FBOs buying ready-to-eat ingredients from suppliers and for final product retail customers.
Hours after making the guidance freely available, industry colleagues were sharing and cascading it to their teams. They hailed the document as: ‘an excellent guide’, ‘a great document’, ‘extremely useful’ and commenting ‘bravo to those who put this together.’ Within a month there had been more than 200 downloads of the guidance.
The free guidance can be downloaded here.
September 2023