Ecolab Reports on Food Safety

Ecolab Inc. (www.ecolab.com) has published research data that measures food temperatures in retail and consumer refrigerators and freezers. The EcoSure 2007 Cold Temperature Evaluation was undertaken by EcoSure, Ecolab’s food safety and quality assurance business, as an update to past research done in 1989 and 1999.

The updated research report is available for download free of charge at www.FoodRisk.org, an online resource specializing in food safety risk analysis. The website is operated by the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition of the University of Maryland and U.S. Federal Drug Administration.

“Understanding the potential for temperature abuse of food is an important element in designing effective food safety controls, and the 2007 data contains essential risk management information that can help the entire food industry,” said Dr. Katie Swanson, Vice President of Food Safety at Ecolab. “We wanted to make these findings broadly accessible to better assist the food industry and risk assessors in evaluating the temperature-related risk profile of food products. The data can enable the industry to maximize new product quality, while minimizing the food safety risk caused by potential temperature abuse and typical shopper behavior that occurs after a product leaves a food retailer’s display case.”

EcoSure collected over 10,000 data points from across the U.S. to reflect the distribution of temperatures for refrigerated and frozen foods at retail locations and in the home. Participants purchased dairy, ice cream products, pre-packaged lunch meat, sliced deli meat, fresh ground beef, fresh fish, pre-packaged deli salads and frozen food at their neighborhood grocery stores and measured product temperatures in the display case, arriving at home, and after 24 hours of at-home storage.

Since the previous studies in 1989 and 1999, thousands of new stores have opened, many existing stores have updated equipment and the U.S. Food Code has lowered the maximum temperature for safe storage of refrigerated foods to 41F from 45F. Consequently, temperatures for refrigerated and frozen foods were lower in 2007 than temperatures reported in previous years, and EcoSure’s findings showed that the majority of retail refrigerators studied are successfully keeping food temperatures below 41F.

“Over the last two years, EcoSure had a growing number of food companies tell us how critical these studies are to their new product development processes,” said Robert Sherwood, Vice President & General Manager of EcoSure. “EcoSure remains committed to helping ensure the safety of our food supply system, and that is why we updated and improved this research.”