• Primary responsibility for food safety borne by the food business operator.
• Food safety ensured throughout the food chain, starting with primary production.
• General implementation of procedures based on the HACCP principles.
• Application of basic common hygiene requirements, possibly further specified for certain categories of food.
• Development of guides to good practice for hygiene or for the application of HACCP principles as a valuable instrument to aid food business operators at all levels of the food chain to comply with the new rules.
The Recommended International Code of Practice—General Principles of Food Hygiene (CAC, 2003) is a basis for the implementation of Good Hygienic Practices as it gives the basic rules for the hygienic handling, storage, processing, distribution, and final preparation of food along the production chain. This code contains the Annex on HACCP system and guidelines for its application. In addition, the Code of Hygienic Practice for spices and dried aromatic plants (CAC, 1995) is more specific to our purpose and includes the minimum requirements of hygiene for harvesting, postharvest technology (curing, bleaching, drying, cleaning, grading, packing, transportation, and storage, including microbial and insect disinfestation), processing establishment, processing technology, packaging, and storage of processed products.
Conclusion
Standard specifications are important criteria determining the market value of a high value-added product highly demanded on the international market such as natural vanilla beans. During the postharvest preparation and processing of vanilla beans, microbiological hazards can occur at any stage and could compromise both safety and quality standards of cured vanilla beans. Key common factors for the beans preservation include (1) the maturity of the harvested beans to optimize the vanillin yield as having antimicrobial activity against molds and bacteria, (2) the killing and drying steps of curing to control the microbial development on the beans, (3) the hygienic conditions during the whole postharvest process to control the occurrence of contaminations and cross-contaminations between different batches of beans, and (4) the conditioning step and postprocess storage to control the microbial growth and activity (production of mycotoxins from molds). To help producers and processors implementing these controls along the processing chain, it is necessary to build HACCP system based on sound Good Hygienic Practices (GHP), Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), and Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) achieving an integrated approach to food safety management. Nevertheless, the most important restrictions for the implementation of HACCP throughout the whole supply chain of vanilla production might be organizational, since the actors chain involve farmers, collectors, processors, and exporters that do not necessarily comply with a vertical coordination, which has been reported to be more efficient for this purpose (Hobbs and Kerr, 1992). In this context, HACCP might face the problem of small operators with limited resources in developing countries.
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