Food Safety Focus | Thermometer Checks

Food Safety Focus

Hello All! 

I hope this message finds all of you and your families safe and well.

This food safety focus will be about thermometer checks.  

It can be said that temperature is the most important control point that we have in storage and distribution, so it is critical to make sure that we are following the temperature requirements of the products we handle every day.

If a 3rd party auditor or someone from the USDA, for instance, visits and asks for all the thermometers we use, and then ask for the calibration records for the last few months, what answers will they get? 

It’s not good if we can’t produce these records or even the thermometers themselves.  The auditor or inspector could also ask to do a thermometer calibration check during their visit.  If any thermometers fail during this temperature check, then all the temperatures taken for all the products that were received using that thermometer are suspected as wrong.  If you have records of calibrations, then the failed thermometer check would only go back as far as the last thermometer check that did not fail.  If there are no records… needless to say it could turn a quick inspection into something far worse.  It’s better to make sure the records are kept up, as they should.  This may not seem like a big deal with frozen products, however, what about refrigerated products with a +5 or +7 degree deviation on the thermometer?

Some customers have been known to require daily thermometer checks; however, we should be checking the accuracy of our receiving thermometers at least once a week, and recording the temperature checks in a log.

Thanks for all you do every Day,

Justin

Food Safety Manager

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Author: Trish Metts