There has been recent talk in the industry regarding new guidelines from the FSA involving rare burgers. A new arrangement is now in effect involving the approval process. Whilst this is relevant to businesses who serve rare burgers, the new approval requirement relates directly to the meat plant producing the mince or the raw burgers to be supplied to the caterer.
Such plants always needed to be approved by the FSA for producing mince but as of March 2017, if they are supplying a business which intends to serve rare burgers (from that mince) the approval needs to specify this. This will in turn be accompanied by additional hygiene checks by the FSA – examining the controls to ensure that the mince is of the necessary high standard to be used by burgers intended to be served rare.
These are tweaks to the application of the current regulations already followed by approved meat processing plants. A full consultation on these proposals was carried out as part of the FSA’s draft guidance on burgers issued last year, and broadly supported.
Good news is that this means caterers can now check that they are getting meat from plants which have approval and are able to supply this higher quality mince. A list of these plants is on the FSA website, currently there are just three but clearly these numbers will grow as a result of these recent changes.
We are aware of some confusion of the needs for caterers to have approval to serve rare burgers. That is not the case. However, rare burgers should only be served if they have the right checks and systems in place – one of which is sourcing their mince from suppliers with this specific approval.
Want to know more about rare burger safe methods? Contact one of the Shield Safety team today on 0203 740 3744 or email sales@shieldsafety.co.uk today.
The information contained in this blog article has been created for marketing purposes and is not official guidance and should not be used as a substitute for official Food Safety, Fire Safety and Health & Safety advice. Shield Safety take no responsibility if the information in the blog article is used to form part of a safety management system or used to form part of any legal or regulatory compliance for your business. For official guidance and to engage with Shield Safety services please do call our team on 020 3740 3744 or email hello@shieldsafety.co.uk.
