Safety Tips to Follow with Food Products

Food producers and sellers have to follow the food safety laws and offer a specific standard of quality. However, a lot depends on how you handle that food. Once food products are purchased, the safety of that food is your responsibility. When shopping for food, you should choose, pack and transport it carefully to make sure it stays safe to eat. Below are mentioned certain tips to ensure the food is transported, stored and consumed safely.

Carefully Select Your Food:

No matter how safe and wholesome the produced food might be, the safety and quality of the food is affected to a great extent, if the packaging or storage is poor. Certain things should be kept in mind while buying food:

• Hot food takeaways, which are not steaming hot, should not be purchased.

• Do not buy soiled products.

• Never purchase uncovered, ready-to-eat foods.

• Frozen or chilled food left out of the refrigerator.

• Inspect can and containers to check dents or leakage.

• Imperfect and damaged packages should never be purchased.

• Do not buy dirty or cracked eggs.

Transporting and Storage of Food:

You should be very careful while transporting certain types of food. Here are some things to note.

• If you bring frozen, hot or chilled food from the supermarkets, try to reach home as fast as possible.

• On hot days, chilled or frozen food may perish if left outside the refrigerator for more than 30 minutes. In such cases, it is a good idea to carry a cooler or insulated bag to keep the food cold. On arriving home, the food should be immediately transferred to the fridge and chilled.

• You should check the labels for specific storage conditions instead of just assuming. 

Take Extra Precaution For High-Risk Foods:

High risk foods are those in which the food-poising bacteria grow and multiply more easily. Be very careful while purchasing these high risk-foods as they require more care in storage and handling. The food in this category should be either kept at a temperature below 0 degree or above 60 degrees. The high-risk foods are as follows:

• Prepared fruit salads, rice salads, pasta salads or coleslaws.

• Ready-to-eat food such as pizza, sandwiches, rolls etc

• Dairy products, such as dairy based desserts like cheesecake and custard tarts.

• Cooked and raw meat, such as beef, lamb, turkey or chicken including the dishes prepared with these, like curries, lasagna and casseroles.

• Seafood items like fish balls, patties, stews containing fish stock and seafood.

• Eggs and egg products, salamis and ham.

• Pasta and cooked rice.

Plan Your Shopping Trip Ahead:

You should plan the sequence of buying the perishable, raw, chilled food items and the rest of the grocery items like vegetables, fruits, whole grains and so on from the supermarkets.

• Prevent the chicken, meat, or fish juices from leaking onto the other products.

• Ensure that the staff use separate utensils while handling various food items.

• The frozen or chilled foods items should be loaded onto your shopping cart towards the end of the shopping.

• The hot food stuff should be purchased towards the end of your shopping trip and kept separate from the cold food stuff.

• Ensure your reusable shopping bags are washed regularly and are not soiled by food liquids.

Check the Packaging Dates

The dates of packaging of perishable food items should be checked carefully and the food should be consumed before the expiry date.

Thus next time when you buy food items from the supermarkets, follow the above mentioned tips for healthy consumption of food.