Air fryers are everywhere — but are they safe? Acrylamide, non-stick coatings, cooking temperatures, and best practices.

The audit ends but the work doesn’t. How to handle corrective actions, verification, and management review so findings never come back.

The Clean Label Movement: Simpler Ingredients, Complicated Tradeoffs “No artificial anything.” “Ingredients you can pronounce.” “Nothing you wouldn’t cook with at home.” The clean label movement — consumer demand for simpler, more “natural” ingredient lists — has reshaped food manufacturing. Products reformulated, preservatives removed, labels scrubbed. It’s a triumph of consumer preference. It’s also a […]

“Retrained Employee” Is Not a Corrective Action. Here’s What Is. If I had a dollar for every CAPA record I’ve reviewed that listed “retrained employee” as the entire corrective action, I could retire. It’s the industry’s favorite non-answer — a shrug in document form. And auditors have developed a finely tuned allergy to it. Here’s […]

The Audit Hit List: Nonconformances That Show Up Every Single Year Certification bodies publish aggregated audit data, and if you read enough of it, a pattern emerges that’s almost comical: the same findings, year after year, across continents, across schemes — SQF, BRCGS, FSSC 22000, doesn’t matter. The industry keeps failing the same test. We’ve […]

Audit Day Checklist: Hour by Hour, From Arrival to Closing Meeting Audit day has a rhythm. The plants that handle it well aren’t calmer by nature — they’re calmer by preparation. Here’s the hour-by-hour playbook, built from years of audit days on both sides of the table. 7:00 AM — The setup hour. Arrive early. […]

AI in Food Safety: Separating the Real From the Demo Video “AI will revolutionize food safety!” The pitch decks say it. The startups promise it. The conference keynotes proclaim it. And — unusually for a hype cycle — some of it is actually true. But the gap between the demo video and the plant floor […]

Dairy Processing: From Raw Milk to Safe Products Raw milk is one of the most nutritionally complete — and microbiologically risky — foods that exists. It’s rich in protein, fat, lactose, vitamins, and minerals. Which is exactly why bacteria love it too. Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter, Brucella, Mycobacterium bovis — raw milk can harbor […]

Cross-Contamination: The 5 Routes and How to Block Each One Cross-contamination is the silent cause behind a huge share of foodborne illness outbreaks and recalls. It’s not a pathogen growing where it shouldn’t — it’s a pathogen (or allergen, or chemical) moving from where it is to where it shouldn’t be. Here’s what makes it […]

Shelf Life Determination: How It’s Actually Calculated “What’s the shelf life?” It sounds like a simple question. The answer involves microbiology, chemistry, sensory science, statistics, and regulatory requirements — and getting it wrong means either unsafe food or massive waste from overly conservative dates. We’ve seen companies set shelf life by copying competitors (“they use […]