Hi all,
Hoping someone can give me some advice here. I've read some similar-ish threads on this forum as well as a million other resources but feel I'm just getting more confused!
I manage a small production facility in the UK where we produce frozen ready meals. Our process (from the start of the cook stage) is fairly manual and currently goes like the below. For example, if we're making a curry - generally this is done in 50kg batches at a time:
- Raw food prepped
- Curry mixture cooked; internal temperature validated at 70C for 2 mins
- Curry mixture transferred to shallow trays and moved to blast chiller
- At this stage, the sauce has 90 minutes to go from 70C to 3C
- Once at 3C, the trays are removed one at a time and immediately portioned
- Portioned pots are immediately sealed and moved to the freezer. There is a 30 minute window from removing a tray from the chiller (at 3C) to the finished pot being in the freezer.
- Finished pots are then frozen down to -18C. Unfortunately we don't have the capacity to blast freeze (as well as blast chill), so once at 3C they are just sat in a walk-in freezer - time tests have shown it takes around 8 hours for them to get down to -18C.
So essentially, our current requirement is for the food to go from 70C to 3C within 90 minutes, and then into the freezer within a further 30 minutes. However, managing this in our small (and pretty understaffed!) space is getting harder as we get busier and it's occurred to me that we may be being too strict with these time controls?
We originally used these times/temps because a third party manufacturer (BRC) we briefly used followed these - when I then did our own assessment I essentially assumed this was best practice so we just went with it. Don't judge! From researching this more, I'm coming across so much different guidance but can't see if there's a specific regulation for our category - everyone seems to have slightly different rules for the chilling stage (ie. rapidly descending through the danger zone), and I can't seem to find any guidance around the subsequent chilled-to-frozen timescale?
FSAI states chilling to commence within 90 mins of cooking completion, then 120 mins to get from 55C to 10C, then 60 mins to get from 10C to 3C (so by my reckoning that's 270 minutes to go from 70C to 3C - seems very long??)
North Devon council states <8C in 90 mins
UK Gov just says 'A food business responsible for cooling any food which must, by virtue of this Part, be kept at a temperature below ambient temperatures shall cool that food as quickly as possible following—
-
the final heat processing stage; or
-
if no heat process is applied, the final preparation stage,
to the temperature at which, by virtue of this Part, it must be kept.'
Except this UK Gov one states 63C to 5C in 90 mins...
Australian FSA states 60C to 21C in 2 hours then 21C to 5C in 4 hours
So... I guess my question is, is there any fixed, regulatory time within which food should go from it's validated 'cooked' temperature (ie. the 70C) to it's validated 'cooled' temperature and then from there to it's final frozen temperature (-18C)? We have done micro testing to show our current method is achieving a safe final product, and I know it's probably unusual to be asking if we can 'loosen up' our processes, but even allowing ourselves an extra 30 minutes in which to cool the product down would help us massively. Am I correct in thinking that as long as we can still prove the safety of the finished product, we would be able to do this? Also, most sources seem to start the cooling 'timer' at 63C rather than 70C - since we remove from the heat at minimum 70C, this would then buy us some additional time I suppose...?
I should add: all our products are completely cooked prior to being portioned (ie. if you were so inclined, you could eat them as soon as they come off the heat - we don't portion with any raw meats etc) with the exception of IQF rice and pasta which is included at the portioning stage alongside the cooled 'sauce'. They are then stored and distributed frozen for the customer to also store frozen. Cook instructions are from frozen, and have also been validated.
Any insights/advice would be hugely appreciated - I'm winding myself in knots trying to work all this out (I am not a food tech by trade, very much wearing the hat as part of small-understaffed-company-life!). Hopefully that all made sense and someone can point me in the right direction at least!
Thanks in advance :)