If you own a business that manufactures food, you need to be exceptionally careful when it comes to the manufacture of any products that need to meet certain dietary requirements. One such diet that you may have to cater for is that of vegans, where you need to guarantee that there are no animal products in this food. As this can be due to allergens just as much as it can be due to personal choices, so you need to be able to verify that your food is indeed vegan.
Have a Traceability System in Place
When setting up your production kitchen, you need to make sure that you are also putting a thorough traceability system in place. Should you run into issues with contamination at some point, the traceability system should aid you in clearing up the issue.
It can be used to track any and all ingredients that go into your recipes when they need to be tracked.
You can then trace back through this to find out if there have been any issues with contamination when something arises. This should hopefully allow you to sort out the issue and put precautions in place to ensure that it cannot happen again.
Train Staff on Recipes
If you have staff that are actively selling food to customers, through either a retail or hospitality setting, you need to make sure that they are adequately trained on the menu. As part of their onboarding, have a training day where you take them through the menu and have them understand which dishes have potential allergens in them.
Of course, this can be difficult for them to keep track of all at once, especially in the bustle of a business. For this reason, it can therefore be a good idea for full recipes, ingredients lists, and allergy lists to be kept in a place that is easily accessible by staff. This means that they can check them at ease whenever they need to.
Separate Prep Stations Where Possible
For those manufacturers who might often prep vegan meals, it might be a good idea for you to have a separate station in your kitchen that is purely for vegan foods. The utensils should never leave it, and should certainly be never used to cook food with animal products.
If possible you should also think about separate fridges so your wholly vegan ingredients can be stored separately.
These are good organisational tips to help you deal with the issue of cross-contamination. When trying to keep certain dishes such as vegan dishes free from allergens and animal products, measures like this might prove to be very necessary.
The above points are three things you can do to verify that your food products are indeed vegan. If you are making these products, you need to ensure that you are doing everything in your power to keep them free from contaminants. Make sure that you have the right measures in place in your kitchen now.
