Hi all,
We are a large apple juice manufacturer and have a customer that wants to purchase unpasteurised single strength (i.e. not-from-concentrate) apple juice from us. The customer will ferment the juice into cider. pH of the juice is <4.2. We routinely make pasteurised single strength juice.
Process will be:
1. Apple washing and grading
2. Milling
3. Pressing
4. Holding in non temperature controlled tank
5. Filling into customer supplied road tanker
We are struggling with how to validate the holding time (or "shelf life") of the juice before it is collected by the customer's supplied tanker. We have FSSC22000.
At the holding stage (step 4) we have said the customer must pick up within 4 hours. This is fairly arbitrary. We have assessed this from a quality point of view, and can confirm there will be colour changes and no physical signs of fermentation within 4 hours. We have also micro tested unpasteurised juice (APC, Y&M and coliforms) and unsurprisingly the counts are too numerous to count.
From a food safety POV we could send for pathogen testing for our target organisms (E.coli and Salmonella) but we won't be able to replicate the holding time due to travel time to the external lab. Even if we do get pathogens found, we will not be applying a control point as our customer has requested no heat treatment.
Second part is if we know our customer is going to further process, are we still required to validate the process? It is unpasteursied so inherently a hazardous product.
any advice much appreciated!