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Jul 7, 2019 - Foods

Hygiene guidelines from Uniteis e.V. are an important topic for food inspectors

From May 20 to 22, 2019, a training event took place at the BAV Institute in cooperation with the Federal Association of Food Inspectors Germany e.V. Over 30 food inspectors from all over Germany informed themselves about current topics in food hygiene and law.

An important topic was the hygiene guideline of Uniteis e.V. This was presented by Dario Olivier (President of Uniteis e.V.) and Paul Andrei (Managing Director of BAV Institut GmbH) and discussed with the participants.

First, the creation of the guideline and its background were explained. On the one hand, there are legal backgrounds (Art. 7 of Regulation (EC) 852/2004), and on the other hand, Uniteis e.V. wanted to create a uniform hygiene standard for all artisanal ice cream manufacturers in Germany. This standard must be feasible for the businesses and suitable as a guide for hygiene inspections and microbiological examinations for food monitoring.

This was intended to create clear and uniform requirements so that businesses know what is expected of them and how they should implement it to satisfy food monitoring.

Since businesses' self-monitoring must be considered in food monitoring inspections in the future (Art. 9 of the Control Regulation), all involved parties (businesses and monitoring), are at an advantage due to the notified Uniteis guideline.

Dario Olivier also mentioned that Uniteis e.V. has published a book with the guideline in Italian and German for its members and distributed it to all members. The association aims to promote the awareness and implementation of the guideline.

In Paul Andrei's presentation, the key contents of the guideline were outlined:

• Requirements for premises, facilities, and equipment
• Good hygiene practice
• Microbiological quality controls
• Presentation of a “HACCP concept”
• Annexes (checklist and templates for documentation)

Besides legal aspects, Paul Andrei explained the advantages of microbiological self-monitoring for businesses. Using statistics, he demonstrated that businesses improved through regular self-monitoring. The comparison of the investigation results from swab investigations from 2013 and 2018 showed an improvement of over 7%. Through regular engagement with examination results, businesses continuously learn and improve their hygiene standards.

The entire forum agreed that the Uniteis guideline is a success for the entire industry and even has an influence on other sectors and even other European countries.

We are very happy to support you in these topics and challenges as a partner. If you have any questions, please contact Ms. Christine Käfer by phone at 0781/96947-286 or by email at christine.kaefer@bav-institut.de.