2 replies to this topic

[Pete Froesse]

We are repurposing an older building for use with a peanut drying and roasting facility. The Raw peanuts are salt-brined, then dried using a continuous dryer in a separate room(Room 1). Once dried, peanuts are conveyed into another room (Room 2)that houses the roaster. Peanuts will be roasted in this room and a thermal kill step will be achieved. My question has to do with whether we can pack out into super sacs our RTE peanuts in the same room that the roaster is located in or do the peanuts need to be conveyed into another room (possible room 3) for bag out and packaging?

 

Currently a process is in place to empty the roaster in raw only bins if the roaster malfunctions (room 2). After the RTE peanuts have been packed into supersacs, they are brought into a shipping room. (room 4). Once complete this facility would be SQF edition 9 module 2&11 audited.

[jfrey123]

I can't see a reason why you cannot package in the same room.  In a perfect dream world, you'd have raw untreated flowing in from one door to immediately be roasted, and the line would end with packaging at the opposite end with a separate door to take to a separate storage area.  But so long as you aren't finding a contamination risk with the final package traveling through a shared area to your finished goods storage, I can't see why it would be completely unacceptable either.  Probably want to designate employees working packaging separate from the employees handling raw and keep them on their own sides of the lines.

[SQFconsultant]

I agree with everything Jfrey123 said and add an assumption as we had a peanut roasting facility doing pretty much the same thing - my assumption is that the possibility of malfunction is very low and thus build up of partially roasted peanuts is very low - if however malfunctions are more the norm I'd be looking to see how this could impact (cross-over) the super sack packing area in the same room.

 

So, I'd want to see a build-in on the policy of what might happen if that occurs and how it would be immediately addressed to prevent a cross situation.