Salmonella outbreaks can be a disaster on many levels leading to severe consequences, posing serious health risks and even resulting in fatalities. For this reason salmonella (also being a reportable disease) is a constant worry to the makers of RTE foods due to its variety, ubiquity and ease of transport. At FreshCheck, our mission is to help food producers actively mitigate these risks by providing fast, reliable hygiene testing solutions that detect contamination early, ensuring that Salmonella and other threats are managed before they can impact consumer health or business integrity.
Salmonella’s High Stakes
However, outbreaks carry hidden costs, whether or not they lead to recalls, media coverage, or reported illnesses. Even without public attention, these events can affect operations, regulatory compliance, and consumer trust., These costs do not stop at simply the cost of the product (which will likely need to be recalled/destroyed), or even the impact of fines and recall costs, but continue throughout society. Costs such as the effect on share price, loss of reputation and ultimately may even include the cost of hospital treatment for affected individuals. Not all of these costs will have to be borne by the producer, but many will, and they must be paid for whether by money or by reputation. It was well publicised at the time that the total cost to Cadbury’s of its disastrous 2006 salmonella outbreak was between 20 and 30 million pounds (including recall costs and a million pound fine). Perhaps that cost is even higher when you consider that the incident is well remembered in certain circles, particularly if you were one of the 40+ individuals who got ill.
Hidden Salmonella Outbreak Costs
In fact, according to a study carried out by the FSA, the cost to affected individuals of non-typhoidal Salmonella food poisoning was calculated to be a massive £143 million. This includes the cost of time off work, dealing with potential complications such as reactive arthritis and the effect on the individual’s quality of life that these complications might have.
Financial Burden
A related piece of work was carried out between 2015-2020 to further examine the cost to businesses from Salmonella outbreaks. This included taking into account production disturbance and testing escalation procedures, as well as loss of revenue and reputation. This study found that cases of Salmonella represent a burden to food manufacturers of over £200 million per year. This large amount of money has the potential to seriously impact your business, and puts the resources spent on hygiene and micro testing into proper perspective.
Proactive Risk Reduction
Obviously, the best way to reduce the risk of ending up in a potentially expensive and even ruinous situation is to not infect anyone with Salmonella in the first place. But your hygiene plan should encompass more than just crossed fingers and prayers. It should also move beyond just surveillance and taking standardised corrective actions when you get a presumptive or confirmed Salmonella. It should look at what to do when you have to recall products and the pathway towards regaining the confidence of your customers and/or consumers.
Sampling Limitations
The limitations of traditional micro sampling (long turn-around times, price and technical opacity) mean that this is only 1 tool in your arsenal against Salmonella. A correctly run food production will look at other methods for minimising and best utilising the expensive but specific micro sampling. Ensuring that environments are appropriately clean can help ensure that any Salmonella present can be more easily detected in the laboratory. This is because one of the main causes of false negatives, from a traditional micro perspective, is low levels of Salmonella being out-competed by other similar flora (hello Enterobacter sakazakii and cloacae and Citrobacter freundii). This makes it more essential that due diligence levels of cleanliness are achieved, particularly as Salmonella is not considered safe at any level (unlike, say, Listeria or E.coli which have acceptable limits listed in the RTE guidelines).
Confidence in Cleanliness
FreshCheck helps to give you the necessary confidence that hygiene procedures are being followed as they should be, and that the factory provides the correct environment for food production. However it can also give another layer of confidence - ensuring that the factory presents a condition that can be effectively sampled for more specific and dangerous organisms, which helps ensure quality of produce extends from inside the factory, to outside and into consumer’s hands. Contact FreshCheck today to explore how our hygiene testing solutions can enhance your food safety standards.