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New concerns about Maple Leaf Foods 09 Nov 2009

According to inspection reports, inspectors found a troubling lack of hygiene Maple Leaf's Toronto facility just weeks after it reopened last year from a temporary shutdown for cleaning.
New concerns about Maple Leaf Foods
The Canadian Press (CP) obtained that inspection report and others under the Access to Information Act.
 
According to CP, a top-to-bottom scrubbing after a deadly listeriosis outbreak apparently didn't fully cleanse a Maple Leaf Foods plant of mould, slime and meat debris.
 
However, Maple Leaf says inspectors were looking more carefully at the plant after the listeriosis crisis, so naturally they found more problems.
 
Problems were found during a check-up by Canadian Food Inspection Agency staff who found mould on the walls and floor, slime underneath a meat-trimming table, leftover meat on wheeled container bins and rusty equipment.
 
The infractions are listed on an inspection report dated Oct. 10, 2008. They include:
-slime on part of the meat-trimming table in the curing room;
-meat debris on two steel container bins and unidentified debris on the brine tank in the curing room;
-a moist and mouldy cardboard sheet on the base of a skid in the curing room that holds bags of salt;
-mouldy caulking on the walls of the meat-defrosting room;
-a stack of dirty, mouldy and broken skids left in the frozen pack-off room during cleaning;
-food debris on knife holders, floor and meat containers in the formulation room; and,
-rust on equipment used to process mock chicken.
 
The food-inspection agency issued a corrective-action request during the Oct. 10 check-up.
 
Corrective-action requests state the nature of the problem and give the company up to 60 days to fix it. When the inspector returned on Oct. 20, the mould was gone and many other problems had been fixed.
 
In subsequent checkups that month, the inspector reported that the rust had been sandblasted from the mock chicken equipment, and other problems had been fixed.
 
However, more issues turned up during another visit on Dec. 12.
 
The inspector found small chunks of meat on a conveyor belt and on the buttons that operate it. A worker struggled to clean the equipment as the inspector looked on.
 
 
 
 
  
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