Modernizing the preparation of the Malaysian traditional mixed rice dishes with cook-chill central kitchen and implementation of HACCP

This paper demonstrated the implementation of a Cook-Chill central kitchen to automate the preparation of traditional mixed rice dish (MRD) and its food hazard analysis based on Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) program. The preparation of the MRD is commonly associated with the traditional home-style kitchen, tedious manual processes and uncontrolled food hazards that caused serious illness including fatalities. In this paper, the conventional preparation of the dishes was transformed into a central kitchen operation with the Cook-Chill technologies that are able to prepare up to 600 meals/day with a shelf-life of 5 days and no meals wastage. With the HACCP plan, eight critical control points (CCPs) were determined at the thermal processing, portioning, rapid chilling, product storage and dispatch, whereby all CCPs were concerned with the microbiological hazards. The results indicate the possibility to modernize the local dish preparation into efficient mass production without compromising food safety through the HACCP plan. The study was also meant to demonstrate the feasibility of turning the complicated traditional cooking preparation into a modern gastronomy system with three-fold higher in productivity/day and create the awareness on the importance of setting up a systematic food safety system. Importantly, during the set-up, correct food hazards were identified and control measures were implemented for preventing the foodborne illness problem

Analysis of the most frequent nonconformance aspects related to Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the food industry and their main factors

Despite the increasing evidence that small processors have a low rate of food safety compliance, primarily due to the lack of Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) implementation, only a limited number of research studies have been conducted to understand their challenges. The aims of this review were twofold, namely 1) to analyse the GMP’s most frequent nonconformance aspects in small food processing and (2) to elucidate the key factors that lead to the nonconformance aspects. The review was carried out based on twenty peer-reviewed publications between the years 2012 to 2021, which collected studies related to GMP and small-scale processors. Inadequate sanitary design and facilities were identified as the most frequent GMP nonconformance aspect (85% of the total number of publications), followed by poor personal hygiene (55%), inadequate or absence of documentation (55%), poor cleaning and maintenance programs (50%), lack of operation control (50%), lack of training (35%), inadequate product information (15%) and lack of workers’ health control (15%). Such nonconformances were found to result in incidences of foodborne diseases, unacceptable microbial growth in products and ambient areas, quality degradation as well as findings of filthy matters. The factors that led to nonconformance were the lack of on-site supervision, financial constraints, lack of knowledge, lack of managerial support, the gap in authority's enforcement and workers' resistance to food safety practices. The review concludes with a suggestion for future work to formulate a cohesive program that integrates multiple strategies in addressing the identified key factors and subsequently, enabling GMP adoption among SMEs

Study of machines performance in producing different sizes of grated sago

Sago starch is a product from sago palm. In order to extract the sago starch, certain process is needed to break the bonding of the pith either mechanically or manually by grating the pith into small sizes. Water is widely used as a solvent medium in the extraction process of sago starch. The more refined that grated sago, the more sago starch can be dissolved from the grated sago. Different machines were used to produce grated sago for machine capability test. The machines are handheld chainsaw, coconut husk decorticator, commercial coconut grater and in-house roller grating prototype. Sago palm trunk was cut into three parts with length of 50 cm long each. The outer layer of each sago palm trunks was peeled off and split into 8 pieces. All sago trunks were grated using four different machines as stated above. Each 100 gram of the grated sago trunk produced by each machine were sifted according to the grading size of 2.80 mm, 2.00 mm, 1.00 mm, 0.85 mm and 0.425 mm. The weights of sago starch from the sieving process were recorded according to their respected grading size. Based on results of the sieve experiments, the most finest grated sago trunk was produced from the handheld chainsaw with a weight percentage ratio of 13.028% (X < 0.3 mm), 10.682% (0.3 ≤ X < 0.425 mm), 28.361% (0.425 ≤ X <0.85 mm), 28.821% (0.85 ≤ X <1.0 mm), 4.728% (1.0 ≤ X <2.0 mm), 7.877% (2.0 ≤ X <2.8 mm), and 4.868% (X ≥2.8 mm) where X value refer to sieve mesh size