MEAT+POULTRY - July 2015 - 70

FOOD SAFETY

Chasing

Listeria

BY L AW R E N C E AY LWA R D | L AYLWA RD @ SOSL A N D.CO M

The good
news is that
a can-do
attitude has
gradually
permeated
the industry
when it
comes to
detecting
the deadly
pathogen
(Photo courtesy of
West Liberty Foods)

or food-safety personnel at meat or
poultry plants, detecting Listeria
monocytogenes is akin to finding a
needle in a haystack.
"You are chasing something you can't see,"
says Melissa Raybon, the plant manager at
Fieldale Farms' poultry-processing plant in
Baldwin, Ga. "You are chasing a ghost."
But plant managers and food-safety experts
at meat and poultry plants can't afford to ignore
Listeria, which can kill and has killed people
that have eaten food products contaminated
with it. The good news about Listeria (if there
is any) is that most plant managers and foodsafety experts are vigilant about detection and
preventing the spread of the pathogen.
"We realize we need to know if it's there
... because we're ultimately responsible
for the outcome," says Lee Johnson, Ph.D.,
vice president of technical services for West
Liberty, Iowa-based West Liberty Foods,
which processes sliced meats. A we-can-find-it
attitude has gradually permeated the culture of
the meat and poultry industry, Johnson adds.
At Fieldale Farms, Raybon leads a
proactive program to find Listeria - taking a
minimum of 120 swab samples weekly. "Our
philosophy is to do everything we can to
find it so we can get it back under control or
eradicate it," she explains.
The last thing Raybon wants to occur is
a recall for contaminated product. "Because
there's a whole new set of issues if we find it
on product," she says.

MEAT+ POULTRY | 07.15 | www.meatpoultry.com

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
Raybon, who has worked in the poultry
industry for 17 years, has spent nearly five
years at Fieldale. Her first exposure to a
Listeria outbreak occurred at a previous job
at a poultry plant located in the Southeast that
produced fully cooked poultry.
After "tearing apart everything on the
production line" to find the source of the
outbreak, Raybon and others turned their
attention to two exhaust stacks - one for a
char-mark and the other for a spiral chiller.
The bug was found in the char-mark stack
after water had seeped into cracks of the
stack's weld when it was sanitized. The
problem was rectified once the cracks
were repaired.
What did Raybon learn from the outbreak?
"I think sometimes we have a tendency to
focus on hand-washing ... don't get me wrong
that is very important ... but we focus more on
the people side of things than the equipment
side of things," she says.
At the time, Raybon felt the breakout
had a lot to do with equipment design.
She still does. To that point, she stresses
that equipment needs to be broken down
properly on a regular basis so the sanitation
crew has time to clean it properly. However,
she realizes that shutting down production
lines isn't an option. That's why Raybon
implemented zone cleaning on Sundays at
the Fieldale plant. Every Sunday or every
other Sunday, Raybon and other members of
the food-safety team will concentrate on a
specific area of the plant to deep clean.
One of those areas is the oven room. "So
this Sunday, for example, we will remove
all the belts from the ovens and soak them,"
Raybon explains. In addition, nuts and bolts
will be removed from conveyors and those
materials will be hand scrubbed. And then
it's all put together again before undergoing
normal sanitation on Sunday night.
Then it's on to the other zones in the plant
the following Sundays. The goal is for every
zone to receive a detailed cleaning about
every 10 weeks.
Once a month, Raybon and Fieldale's
quality assurance manager and maintenance
manager also survey the RTE lines and
freezers, looking for anything they think

http://www.meatpoultry.com

MEAT+POULTRY - July 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of MEAT+POULTRY - July 2015