Food health control
-primary aim is to prevent food poisoning and other foodborne diseases
-it's an obligation from the state → government organization: Bulgarian Food Safety Agency
-2 kinds of control: preliminary and current control → based on legislative documents
-health control is based on 3 main groups of indices
- Complex of biological indicator of nutritive value: composition (main & additional nutrients, physical & chemical properties, organoleptic indices…)
- Complex of suitable for consumption or harmless: indicators of damaged organoleptic breaking characteristics, changes of physical/chemical characteristics, bacterial pollution, toxic fungi…etc.
- Complex of commercial indicators: external view, packaging, food labeling (common name of product), net contains (weight, measure, ingredients…)
Stages of health monitoring
- Introduction: history of the product (producer, date, origin, quality, ingredients, technology…), data must be on the documents accompanying the product
- Taking samples: protocol for sampling food, first inspection of the food and then common, medium or double sample (samples are taken always in presence of the owner/representative), 2 samples (first is analyzed, second is protected in laboratory), immediately sending of the sample to the laboratory after taking the sample (fast damaged food=2-4h; dry food=12-13h), for microbial analysis → sterile container; ALL samples have to be labeled with time, place, data, hour, goal of investigation and kind of analysis
- Analysis of the samples: chemical, microbiological, parasitological, organioleptic…etc.
- Conclusion: 2 possible outcomes of the investigation:
- First possibility: food is good, fit for use, harmless, standard (corresponding with the documents)
- Second possibility: food is NOT-standard
- → fit for consumption but with small changes without mean for consumers health
- → conditional fit for use (consumption with determinate condition) → fast realized, regime heat treatment…
- → not fit for use (whole quantity of food has to be destroyed by definite way)