Oil Roasting Peanuts and Tree Nuts

Hello All,

We are currently Oil Roasting mainly Peanuts for our facility. Sometimes in emergency situations we roast Tree Nuts such as Cashews, Hazelnuts, etc. Would anyone know if there is a cross contamination issue in regards to the Peanut and Tree Nut protein that may be left in the oil? I sometimes fear that when we roast Peanuts and then roast Tree nuts or vise versa that there will be some protein residue left in the oil. What are some people's thoughts as to this? And is there a proven process for this? We only have 1 Oil Roaster which is strictly for Peanuts. 

Hi Quality Supervisor,

IMO, yes you need to follow changeover (cleaning, sanitation etc.) procedure as Allergen is involved.

In my  previous company we were using some times same roaster for peanuts and cashew, pistachios but clean up was followed by QA inspections. if QA passes the inspection only then production moves ahead otherwise recleaning etc. (though we had may contain statement on packaging)

Apart from that if the peanut piece or cashew piece remains in the oil and mixes with the other product which should not be ... can cause customer complaints.

So technical changeover procedure need to be followed.

hope it helps.

We have a nut facility and would not do this - the possibility of cross-allergen is just way too high for someone allergic to peanuts.

Hey Quality,

I would take a good hard look at the process.  You are looking at a high allergen item and mixing in other products.  You should have an allergen program and risk assessments already in place, I imagine, I would redo them and see what kind of risk for impact and health hazard you would have for this.  it is just too high to risk it.  You might be skating by now but unless you do a full cleanup and line changeup from non-allergen to allergen then you are no longer looking for if an event "will" occur but "when."

Cheers!

Are you referring to specifically the oil and not the equipment (oil pumped out of the roaster prior to sanitation, inspection, and sign off)?  

I used to be at a facility that filtered oil to remove FFA and then the oil would be pumped from filtered oil tanks into one of two oil roasters that roasted peanuts and a variety of tree nuts.  I wondered the same as I reviewed our allergen control program so I would take samples of "dirty" oil and filtered oil for analysis by an accredited third party lab for the presence of specific tree nut and peanut proteins. The results would always come back as proteins not being detected and used this information as part of the risk assessment. 

Hi,

not easy to answer.

I am not aware of the process temperatures in oil roasting, but they should be much higher than in baking (my background).

What are the protein levels in the oil over time?

What's about the allergenicity of the protein in the oil? Is the structure of the protein after heat treatment in the oil phase still in the shape to cause allergic reaction in sensitive persons?

Known is that e.g. hazelnut has several allergens, heat lable and heat stable. I know that e,g, baking is not able to destroy the protein structure to zero allergenicity. Same for peanut.

Be aware that test results from test kits are not able to answer the question whether sensitive persons will still respond or not.

For peanuts you will find some literature on such examinations, where test kits are created on lab scale containing antibodies from sensitive persons,

-> A lot of questions not easy to answer for a risk assessment.

Over all - production planning and change over procedures might be easier.

Rgds

moskito