What Are The Hygiene Benefits From The Way We Grow?
Due to the surge in Covid-19 cases around the world, proper hygiene practices such as hand washing have become a more regular part of daily routine. However, the importance of maintaining high hygiene standards has always been critical when it comes to food safety. Given the sheer number of restaurants in the UAE, local government regulations prescribe exact procedures and requirements for establishments that handle and serve food. For example, Madar Farms has been a certified member of Dubai Municipality’s FoodSafe initiative since 2018. While we can be confident in the hygiene protocols governing where our food was served, do we really know under what conditions our food was grown and packed?
We’ve all experienced some sort of food contamination at one point in our lives – but did you know that food contamination kills almost half a million people every year? [1] Unsafe food containing harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites, or chemical substances causes over 200 types of disease – ranging from diarrhea to cancers. In 2019 Romaine Lettuce grown in California was recalled twice due to E.Coli contamination, which can cause pneumonia, urinary tract infections, or even kidney failure. The outbreak was found to originate in field agriculture due to contaminated water sources. Madar Farms eliminates this risk by only using municipal drinking water as our indoor farms’ water source, which passes through a 3-stage purification process consisting of a UV-light, a sediment filter, and a carbon filter.
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) is a widely recognized food safety certification. Rather than rely on intensive inspections of the final product, HACCP’s approach is to ensure that standard operating procedures are designed to avoid food safety hazards in the first place. Our operations are HACCP certified, but we hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Our hygiene protocols are founded on three principles: education of staff, mitigation of potential risks, and strict adherence to standardized processes. Every single grower in our team holds Basic Food Hygiene certifications, and farm managers are Level 3 Food Safety certified. Potential contamination risks are minimized through structural and procedural practices.
Upon entering our farms, our staff remove their street clothes and put on food handler workwear (white cotton lab coats and trousers). Shoes are changed, hands are washed, and then all workers pass over a shoe disinfection mat. Inside the farm, daily and weekly cleaning routines ensure all critical surfaces are properly cleaned and disinfected with plant-safe sanitizers.
We use steel structures to prevent pest intrusion. In our farms, we use hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) to sanitize all surfaces and growing environments. We chose this because the only byproducts of this formula are simply water and oxygen – things that people and plants love. Even our water and air are treated by UV filters, running 24/7 to ensure that even in the unlikely event that a contaminant enters the farm, it will be neutralized immediately before spreading. Most importantly, access is restricted to only those essential to growing, with a strict visitor policy that restricts physical entrance to the farm (we still have windows that allow you to see our growers at work because we value transparency).
We go above and beyond regulatory requirements by submitting random samples of our produce to screen for all recognized pathogens to third party laboratories that are accredited by Emirates International Accreditation Center (ISO/IEC 17025:2005). Although this extra step is not required by local law or even industry best practice, we choose to do this to ensure our customers are eating the safest food possible coming from our farms.
As we excitedly look forward to building our new facility, we are working to ensure that the highest standards of food safety and hygiene are incorporated into the facility design and layout. We are employing lessons learned in our R&D facility to further minimize the risk of either a plant-based infection or harvested produce contamination. We have benchmarked the industry’s recognized food hygiene leaders and are in consultation with two international food safety consultancies to ensure that this commercial-scale facility delivers not only locally grown, nutritious food, but that food that is safe for you and your families, for decades to come.