Baking&Snack - February 2013 - 111

Q&A: FOOD SAFETY
Jennifer Frankenberg

For more than a decade, many bakers and equipment suppliers bemoaned how the Baking Industry Sanitation Standards
Committee’s (BISSC) standard had become outdated and increasingly irrelevant as technology advanced. That’s why several organizations — including the American Bakers Association (ABA),
AIB International and BEMA — enlisted Gale Prince, president of
Sage Food Safety Consultants, Cincinnati, and his business partner, Jennifer Frankenberg, to review what is now known as the
ANSI/ASB/Z50.2 Bakery Equipment — Sanitation Requirements.
Mr. Prince and Ms. Frankenberg, who are experts when it
comes to food safety, traceability and quality control, collaborated
with a group of bakers and equipment vendors to update ANSI/
ASB/Z50.2. According to Ms. Frankenberg, the voluntary stan-

dard follows the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
consensus process.
Ms. Frankenberg has food industry experience that includes
regulatory compliance, recall administration, sales and marketing, and ingredients procurement. She worked with regulatory
agencies on issues such as product questions, recall activities
and food-borne illness investigations and also performed dairy
plant inspections to ensure regulatory compliance and high
sanitation standards.
As BEMA and the American Society of Baking (ASB) get ready
to hold their annual Best Week in Baking in early March, she provided a progress report on what the industry has accomplished
during the past two years.

New Standards
for Sanitation

Baking industry takes a major step forward to improve
the guiding principles surrounding sanitary design of equipment.

Dan Malovany: What is the status of
the ANSI/ASB/Z50.2 Bakery Equipment – Sanitation Requirements?
Jennifer Frankenberg: In 2011, baking
industry representatives, including bakers, bakery engineers, equipment manufacturers and academics, participated
in updating the ANSI Z50.2 standard.
In February 2012, a revised draft of the
standard was presented to ASB’s Z50
Committee, which then voted to move
the revision forward through the ANSI
approval process. In October 2012, the
ANSI Board of Standard Review approved this new version of the ASB Z50.2
standard. This official document is now
posted on ASB’s website (www.asbe.org).
This year, our volunteers will continue to
improve and revise the standard. For example, they want to reduce redundancies
within the document and include new
types of equipment.

www.bakingandsnack.com

How does the standard compare
with a year ago?
The 2012 version looks quite different
from the previous document. It contains
more than 260 individual line changes. In
addition, 23 subsections were permanently
removed and another 50 subsections were
added. The most substantial revisions were
made to the Definitions and the Principles
of Design sections. These sections help define important terms, acceptable materials
and goals in the design and fabrication of
bakery equipment; therefore, additional
focus was placed on them. Overall, the
standard is more robust.

What areas in the revision caused
the most challenges?
The Definitions and Principles of Design
sections are critical to the rest of the standard, and the wording had to be precise
enough to avoid confusion but general

enough so as not to exclude specific equipment designs. The group has been careful
to avoid dictating specific design elements
of bakery equipment without compromising good sanitary design.
In some areas, it came down to specific
wording. For example, on some principles,
there were extended discussions on the
use of “should” or “shall.” While these may
seem like small issues, decisions such as
these made large impacts on the meaning
of the specific principle and were instrumental to improving the standard.
This year, the challenge has been incorporating new equipment types or features.
We have new groups that are working on
electrical controls and robotics. Another
working group is looking at bagel equipment. These groups have been writing new
sections from scratch, rather than updating pre-existing sections, which has proven
more difficult.

February 2013 / Baking & Snack / 111

http://www.asbe.org http://www.bakingandsnack.com

Baking&Snack - February 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Baking&Snack - February 2013