International Specialty Supply
Supplying Sprout Companies Throughout the World
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International Specialty Supply Supplying Sprout Companies Throughout the World
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820 East 20th Street Cookeville, TN 38501 USA 931 526 1106
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Sprout
Safety SproutNet ISS July 12, 2000 The California Dept. of Health and FDA have made a video called "Safer Processing of Sprouts". They developed this in cooperation with the CDC, university researchers and commercial sprout growers. It is meant to be a training video for sprout growers, government inspectors, third party inspectors, grocery chains and produce purchasing agents. We already have this video and we are quite impressed. The CDH and FDA should be congratulated on their efforts. This is quite a service. Had industry tried to put this together, it would have cost a small fortune and probably taken much longer. I did notice some mistakes, but surprisingly few and you can expect this with any training video. All in all I would give it four stars. The video is broken into four modules and module 3 is broken into five sections. It runs 1.45 hours, so as a training video, I think it is best to break this up into about four training sessions. I highly recommend this to all of the target groups. If you are in the sprout industry, you need to study this and show it to your production workers. It comes nicely packaged in a three ring binder with about a hundred pages of other information that is useful to sprouters such as an inspection checklist, information about dry chlorine, list of food safety suppliers, guide to reduce food safety hazards, and other information. I suspect if this were put together by a commercial training company with intent to sell to sprout growers they would charge between $500 and $3,000. The CDH and FDA are subsidizing this and are making the tape available for under $25. If you are concerned about giving your name to the FDA, contact your ISS salesperson and we will buy it for you. If you are not from the US, contact you ISS sales person and we will help you get one also and make sure that it is playable in your type of video player. Unfortunately, I can't put my hands on the ordering information but wanted to get this SproutNet out anyway. I will publish it as soon as I can locate it. One of
the companies who allowed the filming of their sprout operation for this video
is now out of business. They voluntarily made a major recall of their
product because their lab, using a Neogen test, returned a positive test for
E.coli 0157:H7. They stayed closed for three weeks trying to locate the
problem. They are now convinced it was a false positive test but have
decided not to reopen. I don't know if this was because of the Neogen test
or not, but other growers have reported problems with Neogen tests.
We will miss you Daniel and Lillian Reed of Our Gang Sprouts. |