Evolution of HACCP - How an Alien Standard Become the Saviour of Food Manufacturers

Hi guys, I found a good reading recently and wanted to share it with you, this is a part of a published document, as it is part of a chapter of a book. If you want to read the full story please visit the Google books where you will find “Social Impact of Spaceflight” :A book by Steven J. Dick, Chapter 12 – “From farm to Fork”, How Space Food Standards Impacted the Food Industry and Changed Food Safety Standards. By Jennifer Nazzal – Pages 219 – 236. I love the story from start to end and we all envy How HACCP came in to the food industry and if you want to know it as you are already working with it. Please read it it is the history of our profession as food safety is in our veins.  

Or you can directly reach the article by http://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-chapter12.pdf

     

 Most Americans give a little thought to the safety of their food until they hear of an E. coli outbreak or a recall of their favorite item. They may be surprised to learn that Space age technology designed to protect the astronauts from food poisoning has slowly become the safety standard for the food industry in the U.S. and abroad. Dubbed the hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) system, this NASA spinoff has been called “the most revolutionary institutional innovation to ensure food safety of the twentieth century.”[1]

A woman from Connecticut found glass in her baby’s cereal. Soon after, Americans awoke to the news, hearing: “good morning America, there’s glass in your baby food.” Pillsbury Company’s farina, a creamy wheat cereal for infants, had been contaminated when shards of glass fell into a storage bin at one of Pillsbury’s plants, forcing the company to recall the cereal. Upon hearing the news, Robert J. Keith, chief executive officer of Pillsbury, called Dr. Howard E. Bauman, a microbiologist and one of the company’s research directors, into his office.[2] Keith had worked for Pillsbury for more than 30 years and made his way up the corporate ladder, becoming CEO and chairman of the Board in 1967. During the five years he served in this position, he championed many popular causes, one of which included the growing consumer movement. Led by advocate Ralph Nader, consumers increasingly demanded safe food. Keith, sympathetic to such demands, told Bauman this incident would not happen again. Customers needed to know that the company’s products were safe.[3] Publicly, Pillsbury comforted customers by announcing a “considerable change” in the company’s manufacturing processes, but this was not a PR campaign designed to halt fading consumer confidence.[4] Significant changes were underway at Pillsbury in response to the recall, Keith pushed Pillsbury to implement a secure product safety system to minimize the likelihood of another recall of the company’s food products.[5]

For his part, Bauman saw to it that no food would be recalled under his watch, where he planned to implement procedures he had helped develop years earlier while working with NASA, an idea he later pursued with HACCP. Bauman began working at Pillsbury in 1953, when he completed his doctoral degree at the University of Wisconsin. He started out as head of research in the bacteriology section at Pillsbury and later assisted NASA, the U.S. Air Force Space laboratory project group, and the U.S. Army Natick laboratories with the food systems for the human spaceflight programs.[6] Some of the other key individuals involved with the development and testing of the early space food systems included Herbert A. Hollender, Mary V. Klicka, and Hamed el-Bisi of the U.S. Army Natick laboratories. Paul A. Lachance of NASA’s manned Spacecraft center in Houston, Texas, rounded out the group. Pillsbury became involved in the space program in 1959 when the Quartermaster food and container institute of the United States armed forces (later called the U.S. Army Natick laboratories) phoned Bauman and asked for Pillsbury’s assistance.

Would the Pillsbury Company be interested in producing space food? After some discussion, the company accepted and began working on cube-sized foods for the flight crews.[7] concerned about safety, NASA engineers specified that the food could not crumble, thereby floating into instrument panels or contaminating the capsule’s atmosphere. To meet the outlined specifications, food technologists at Pillsbury developed a compressed food bar with an edible coating to prevent the food from breaking apart. In addition to processing food that would not damage the capsule’s electronics, the food also had to be safe for the astronauts to consume. Almost immediately food scientists and microbiologists determined that the assurance of food safety was a problem. Bauman recalled that it was nearly impossible for companies to guarantee that the food manufactured for the astronauts was uncontaminated. “We quickly found by using standard methods of quality control there was absolutely no way we could be assured there wouldn’t be a problem,” he said.[8] to determine food safety for the flight crews, manufacturers had to test a large percentage of their finished products, which involved a great deal of expense and left little for the flights.[9] A survey conducted among experts in the field indicated there was no single standard quality control program for the food industry. Control programs were numerous and varied widely, according to Bauman:“ our surveys indicated that there were about as many variations of control programmes as there were quality control managers or government inspectors.”[10] Thus, there was no program already in place that could readily be used to provide a 100 percent guarantee of food safety.

While Pillsbury was dealing with issues of food contamination, Paul Lachance completed a tour of duty with the U.S. Air Force aeromedical research laboratories at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He was well aware of the issues concerning astronaut food as the air force laboratory provided support for the preflight feeding of the mercury astronauts. Given his experience with project mercury, NASA recruited him and offered him the position of flight food and nutrition coordinator at the manned Spacecraft center in Houston.[11] When Lachance arrived in September 1963, he began evaluating the Gemini and Apollo food systems, which were not very far along in development. Food safety for astronauts became an overriding concern for Lachance, who did not want a late night telephone call from Charles A. Berry “who was the chief medical officer of NASA, telling me that his astronaut or astronauts were sick and had stomach problems and were having a hard time holding things down.” Lachance also wanted to avoid putting the crews in jeopardy, and he began thinking about the potential microbiological, physical, and chemical dangers space foods might pose. Microbiological hazards became an overriding concern after NASA found that many of the ingredients they purchased were contaminated with viral or bacterial pathogens. There had to be some way to minimize or eliminate these hazards, Lachance explained.[12] But no one was sure how to conduct a thorough hazard analysis, Bauman recalled. Eventually a suitable model, called the “modes of failure,” was located, adopted, and utilized.

Microbiologists began examining each food item and analyzed the potential areas of concern during the manufacturing process. Armed with this information, scientists then scoured publications to determine ingredients that were potentially dangerous—possibly containing viral or bacterial pathogens, heavy metals, other hazardous chemicals, or physical hazards. A list of hazards was then compiled.[13] For their part, the Natick labs established the microbiological standards for food that would be flown on piloted missions.[14] Requirements were stringent because scientific research had indicated that stress might weaken an astronaut’s ability to fight infection. Even the smallest amount of a relatively harmless microorganism on earth could potentially cause an astronaut in orbit to become ill. Thus, microbiologist Hamed el-Bisi of the Natick labs concluded, “all possible measures must thus be taken to eliminate all pathogens and to minimize the microbial load in all food intakes”. He placed the total aerobic plate count at less than 10,000 per gram, meaning that the food was more likely to be safe for consumption by flight crews.[15]

This was a substantial change for the food manufacturers contracted to develop the Gemini food system. Previously, food processors had not measured pathogens unless they encountered bouts of food poisoning. By contrast, a hazard analysis required contractors to conduct pre- and in-process microbiology tests of food ingredients to ensure the health of the astronauts. Manufacturers had to assure NASA that their foods conformed to the microbiological standards outlined by Natick laboratories. Food manufacturing conditions were strict; there were rigid temperature and humidity controls. Some foods were even processed in clean rooms, similar to the environment in which McDonnell Aircraft Corporation built the Gemini spacecraft.[16] If the food producers did not meet the microbiological standards, food technologists discarded the food.[17] Bauman, who was assigned to the Gemini and Apollo programs, was well suited for the position of ensuring the microbiological safety of astronaut food. Dr. Lachance recalled, Bauman was a microbiologist, “and so he really knew his microbiology. So he was an ideal person, in some ways, to develop a laboratory where microbiology had to be paid attention to.”[18]

As work on the Gemini program preceded, Lachance turned his attention to the Apollo food system. The Apollo Spacecraft program office (ASPO) required its contractors to comply with certain reliability standards. Lachance had previously implemented reliability requirements for the Gemini food system but the ASPO required all contractors to develop prediction models for their systems to determine “critical failure areas” and then eliminate those hazards from the system.[19] Food contractors were not exempt from this requirement and had to sketch out their critical control points—places in the manufacturing process where the system could break down and put the hardware at risk. Writing these blueprints forced Pillsbury to think logically about the steps in their process and identify critical control points. As the Apollo program matured, Pillsbury continued to revise the list of critical control points as they went along. Bauman explained what they learned along the way: “[a]s we worked along in this system, we found certain critical control points like telephones in the room. They are a good source of bacteria, unless you sterilize the receiver, that’s something that you really don’t always think of”, [20] even though NASA required its food contractors to identify critical control points. NASA also determined them in the specifications for most Apollo foods, NASA located 17 quality control stations in the production process; stations had acceptance and rejection standards for the inspectors, or in NASA-ESE, “go” or “no go.”[21] Aside from monitoring the critical control points, contractors also had to keep records that documented the history of a food product. 

Records were kept from the moment the raw foods reached the plant. Logs indicated where the raw materials came from or, if the product had been processed, the name of the plant that produced the item and the names of people who worked in the manufacturing of that item. Strict recordkeeping allowed product tracking, “We knew the latitude and longitude where the salmon used in the salmon loaf were caught,” Bauman joked.[22] As a result of his NASA experience, Bauman became one of the biggest proponents of the HACCP concept, which was introduced to the food industry at the first national conference on food protection in April 1971, just a few days after Pillsbury recalled packages of its farina cereal. The conference, sponsored by the American public health association, opened on April 4 in Denver, Colorado. The main purpose of the conference was “to develop a comprehensive, integrated attack on the problem of microbial contamination of foods.”[23] Prevention of contamination of commercially processed foods. Other panel members included L. Atkin of Arthur D. Little, inc., James J. Jezeski from Montana State University, and John h. Silliker of Silliker laboratories, inc., a food testing laboratory,[24] convinced of the benefits of HACCP, Bauman encouraged his colleagues to consider the system as a plausible option for the food industry as a whole. The idea, however, was not immediately embraced, and a second incident occurred in the summer of 1971.

 References: 

1. John Spriggs and grant isaac, Food Safety and International Competitiveness: The Case of Beef (new York: caBi publishing, 2001), p. 11.
2. Dr. William h. Sperber worked with Dr. Bauman at pillsbury, and he and his colleagues recall hearing this anecdote from Bauman. Dr.William H. Sperber, telephone conversation with author,21 June 2006.
3. William J.powell,Pillsbury’s Best:A Company History from 1869 (minneapolis:the pillsbury company, 1985), pp. 190–191; pillsbury company, Annual Report for the Year Ended 1973 (minneapolis:the pillsbury company, 1973), p. 1; Sperber, telephone conversation, 21 June 2006.
4. “pillsbury recalls cereal; Boxes may contain glass,” The New York Times, 24 march 1971; carole Shifrin,“Warning on farina cereal,” The Washington Post-Times Herald, 25 march 1971.
5. Powell, Pillsbury’s Best, p. 190.
6. Wolfgang Saxon,“howard Bauman, 76, expert Who Kept food Safe in Space,” The New York Times, 12 august 2001.
7. Howard e. Bauman,“the origin of the haccp System and Subsequent evolution,” Food Science and Technology Today 8, no. 2 (June 1994): p. 67.
8. “A dividend in food Safety,” [naSa] Spinoff, (1991): p. 52.
9. Bauman, “the origin of the haccp System,” p. 67; howard Bauman, “haccp: concept, development, and application,” Food Technology 44, no. 5 (may 1990): p. 156.
10. Bauman,“the origin of the haccp System,” p. 68.
11. Paul a. lachance interview, houston, tX, 4 may 2006, JSc oral history project, JSc history collection, University of houston-clear lake.
12. ibid.
13. Natick used “modes of failure” to analyze medical supplies. Bauman,“the origin of the haccp System,” p. 68; Bauman,“haccp,” p. 156.
14. Robert a. nanz, edward l. michel, and paul a. lachance,“evolution of Space feeding concepts during the mercury and gemini Space programs,” Food Technology 21 (december 1967): p. 53; Space food Systems contract naS 9-9032 final report, december 1970, Space food Systems: mercury through apollo (december 1970),rita rapp files,center Series,JSc history collection, University of houston-clear lake.
15. The microbiological standards were established in 1964. hamed m. el-Bisi, “microbiological requirements of Space food prototypes,” Research and Development Associates for Military Food and Packaging Systems, Inc. 17 (1965):pp.55,57;charlest.Bourland interview,houston,tX,7 april 2006, JSc oral history project, JSc history collection, University of houston-clear lake; edmund m. powers, et al.,“Bacteriology of dehydrated Space foods,” Applied Microbiology 22, no. 3 (September 1971): p. 441.
16. Lachance interview, 4 may 2006.
17. Space food Systems contract naS 9-9032 final report; powers, “Bacteriology of dehydrated Space foods,” p. 444.
18. Lachance interview, 4 may 2006.
19. NASA,“reliability program provisions for Space System contractors,” npc 250-1 (Washington, dc: U.S. government printing office, 1963), pp. 3-1, 3-2; lachance interview, 4 may 2006.
20. The pillsbury company, research and development department, Development of a Food Quality Assurance Program and the Training of FDA Personnel in Hazard Analysis Techniques (minneapolis:the pillsbury company, 1973), p. 507.
21. Malcolm c.Smith,et al.,“apollo experience report—food Systems”naSatn d-7720 (Washington, dc:naSa,1974),p.9.
22. Bauman,“the origin of haccp,” p. 68.
23. National conference on food protection, Proceedings (Washington, dc: fda, 1972), p. iii.
24. ibid., pp. 56–83.