How to Set Up Environmental Monitoring Programs

Environmental process control uses environmental monitoring as a key tool. Environmental monitoring measures the risk present in the processing environment and also assesses the hurdles established to control entry of pathogens. This requires multiple sites in the processing environment to be sampled individually and in conjunction with one another. These results indicate the level of control in the facility and help identify when failures occur or when interventions or additional actions are required to bring the process back with control parameters.

However, achieving a high level of environmental process control is not an easy task and requires full cooperation throughout the organization. The relationship between effective EMPs and an organization’s culture is more significant than most food safety practitioners and business leaders realize.

As such, concern can spread quickly throughout a food company when positives are detected through verification activities, especially in cultures where food safety activities are largely completed by food safety professionals. Food safety in these stages is crisis management driven, with leaders stressing the importance of “doing things right” while conducting investigations that fail to get to the root cause.

The development of such effect-driven behaviors that wait for a crisis to engage operations professionals is harmful to consumers, brands, and overall company financial performance. No matter the industry, for an EMP to be as successful as possible, organizational alignment from the food safety experts all the way to the C-suite should ensure that the primary goal of any monitoring program is to proactively and transparently find, correct, and verify problems before they happen, and positive tests are a necessary part of that process. Linking EMPs to organizational and food safety culture can create a “line of sight” to the corporate vision and values, down to individual behaviors, enabling a preventive mindset to help protect consumers, brands, and financial performance.

Effective EMPs, particularly those linked to specific goals such as sanitation validation and verification, can significantly reduce the risk of contamination and associated recalls. For example, good environmental monitoring data are often essential to allow companies to limit recalls to a single lot, production day, or production week. Without appropriate validation and verification data, it is challenging to sufficiently prove that finished product contamination on a given day could not have been transferred to subsequent lots. In addition to food safety hazards, spoilage issues (including problems caused by organisms introduced from the environment in processing plants) represent a growing business risk for food companies. Consumers often use social media platforms to communicate food spoilage issues and pressure companies into action.

Therefore, the business needs for EMPs represent another benefit to food companies. It’s widely known that recalls are extremely costly for companies; despite this given, quantification of the benefits of EMPs is still often considered challenging. As foodborne disease surveillance systems continue to improve, companies are being placed at an increased risk of being identified as the source of an outbreak.

However, food companies have also seen that effective EMPs can facilitate extended run times, thereby improving production efficiency. For example, environmental monitoring may identify difficult-to-clean areas that can be eliminated through equipment redesign, which will subsequently allow for longer production runs.

With renewed industry focus on the programs underpinning HACCP and a greater understanding of the important role environmental monitoring plays in delivering safe products to consumers, it is imperative that food manufacturers regard EMPs as critical and invest the resources necessary to ensure effective execution. Once implemented, it is also vital that the programs evolve with the organization to continuously improve and to foster an effective and positive company culture surrounding food safety.

For more detailed guidance, Cornell University and 3M recently partnered to develop the first comprehensive Environmental Monitoring Handbook for the Food and Beverage Industries, a free resource to guide any processor on how to create a rigorous environmental monitoring program that’s mindful of employees, regulators, and consumers in this safety-conscious time.