Advancing Retail Food Policy Debates: Estimating the Risk of Contaminated Servings of Food Attributed to Employee Food Handling Practices in Retail Food Establishments

Natural Polymers as Carriers for Encapsulation of Volatile Oils: Applications and Perspectives in Food Products

The technique of encapsulating different materials into matrices that can both protect and release their contents under specific circumstances is known as encapsulation. It serves the primary function of shielding delicate components from outside influences, including heat, light, and humidity. This can be accomplished by a variety of procedures that, depending on the method and materials selected, result in the creation of particles with various structures. The materials used for encapsulation in food applications must be of high quality, acceptable for human consumption, and stable during processing and storage. The most suitable natural polymers for food applications are carbohydrates, proteins, or mixtures thereof. Volatile oils are end products of plant metabolism, accumulated and stored in various plant organs, cells, or secretory tissues. These are natural and are characterized by the scent of the aromatic plants they come from. Because of their antibacterial and antioxidant qualities, they are being utilized more and more in the food and pharmaceutical industries. Since volatile oils are highly sensitive to environmental changes, they must be stored under specific conditions after being extracted from a variety of plant sources. A promising method for increasing the applicability of volatile oils is their encapsulation into colloidal particles by natural polymers such as carbohydrates and proteins. Encapsulation hides the unfavorable taste of nutrients while shielding delicate dietary ingredients from the effects of heat, moisture, oxygen, and pH. This technique results in improved stability for volatile oils that are often sensitive to environmental factors and offers the possibility of using them in an aqueous system even if they are insoluble in water. This paper aims to provide an overview of the current advances in volatile oil encapsulation technologies and presents a variety of natural polymers used in the food industry for encapsulation. Also, a distinct section is created to highlight the current advances in dairy products enriched with encapsulated volatile oils.

Evaluation of the Impact of Compliance with Mitigation Strategies and Frequency of Restaurant Surface Cleaning and Sanitizing on Control of Norovirus Transmission from Ill Food Employees Using an Existing Quantitative Risk Assessment Model

ABSTRACT

Reduction of foodborne illness caused by norovirus (NoV) continues to be a focus for the food safety community. Using a previously published quantitative risk assessment model, we evaluated more than 60 scenarios examining the impact of implementation of and compliance with risk management strategies identified in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Food Code for (a) surface cleaning and sanitizing, (b) hand hygiene, (c) exclusion, or (d) restriction of ill employees. Implementation of and compliance with hand hygiene and ill food employee exclusion strategies had the largest impact on the predicted number of highly contaminated food servings and associated consumer illnesses. In scenarios in which gloves were always worn and hand washing compliance was 90%, the model estimated reductions in the number of highly contaminated food servings and ill consumers to 39 and 43% of baseline estimates (i.e., typical practice), respectively. Reductions were smaller when gloves were never worn. Hand washing compliance after using the restroom strongly impacted predicted numbers of highly contaminated servings and consumer illnesses. Ten percent compliance with removing or excluding ill food employees was predicted to increase the number of highly contaminated food servings and ill consumers to 221 and 213% of baseline estimates, respectively. Ninety-four percent compliance with exclusion of ill food employees was predicted to decrease these numbers to 69 and 71% of baseline estimates, respectively. Surface cleaning in food establishments had a relatively small impact on these measures. Restriction of food employees (removed from contact with food and food contact equipment and utensils) was not effective for reducing NoV illness unless this restriction included additional provisions. The results from this study can help risk managers prioritize mitigation strategies and their implementation for controlling the transmission of NoV and subsequent consumer foodborne illness.

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