Ice cream lovers are our people, and that’s why we use Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) to keep our food (and ice cream lovers) safe. GMPs are the general rules that all food manufacturers follow to make sure we’re making food in a safe and sanitary way. Different areas of Rhino Foods’ headquarters follow different GMPs. For example, the offices are more casual, while the warehouse, production areas, and transitional zones are much more strict. In ensuring our food safety, we have a robust program that is grounded in four main preventive controls: Allergen, Sanitation, Supply Chain, and Processing. Each of these categories has a range of safety processes. This list certainly isn’t exhaustive, but here are nine notable ones:
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Protect that Ice Cream! Nine Ways We Keep Our Products Safe
Metal detection: Our metal detector controls the physical hazard of metal. Every unit of product we make passes through a metal detector. If metal is detected, the line will stop and an alarm will sound telling us to begin an investigation into the source.
Chemicals, like cleaning supplies, are kept under lock and key, with color-coded tools, to make sure they stay out of our food. Only trained employees are allowed access.
Pasteurization kills bacteria and keeps our ice cream novelties safe to eat. Yes, that means we heat up our ice cream mix before it becomes the cold and creamy product you love.
Color coding is the easiest way to manage allergens and prevent cross contact. All tools, containers, and equipment (including hairnets!) are color coded. For example, yellow is for eggs and purple is for peanut.
Personnel Sanitation: Strict handwashing rules are in place for all employees. Gloves are worn when working in production and changed regularly. Footwear is sanitized at multiple areas when entering and exiting the higher risk areas like the production room and warehouse.
Facilities Sanitation: Our cleaning team quite literally swabs the deck and all equipment after usage. They don’t rest until everything is 100% free of residual material and squeaky clean. They disassemble the equipment down to the nuts and bolts each afternoon to make sure all the hard to reach nooks and crannies are cleaned.
Labels are found on all finished product cases listing ingredients, allergens, and lot code data for traceability. Additionally, egg containing products sport yellow labels and peanut butter products have purple ones acting as a secondary visual indicator for our customers.
FO (foreign object) prevention requires that all accessories, nail polish, jewelry, etc. are banned in production. Hairnets and beard-nets are worn. Special bright blue metal containing Band-Aids are used so they can’t pass metal detection. Each piece of equipment goes through a Sanitary Design Review along with frequent inspections to make sure they aren’t creating FOs in our products.
Quality Assurance staff are our best problem solvers. Sometimes things don’t go as planned so our QA team are experts in containment, root cause analysis, problem solving approaches, and contribute to designing preventive actions so we learn from our past challenges.
Knowing the extent of our GMPs helps to paint the picture of how thoroughly and seriously we consider food safety. At Rhino, we are fun-loving people, but when it comes to food safety, there really is no room for error and we’re total sticklers for the rules. Plus, nothing makes us happier than seeing everyone enjoy a delicious – and safe – Chesster.