Tag Archives: Food Safety Certification

Hamakua Springs is Food Safety Certified

The farm had its external food safety audit yesterday.

“We don’t hear officially for a week or so, but I know we did pass,” said Tracy Pa, Richard’s daughter, who – among other responsibilities – handles the farm’s food safety certification process.

I asked her how she knows.

“Because the auditor couldn’t believe how clean our place was,” she said, “and how orderly the records are.”

There are two different audits – one for the farm, and another for the packing house. “It’s all about worker protection, safety and cleanliness,” said Tracy.

For the farm audit, she said, you even have to show documentation about what the land was used for before you got there.

“Everything has to be documented,” she said. “We are on land that was previously sugar cane land for 90-100 years.

“There’s a cleaning schedule for when to clean your harvest bins, you have to sanitize your knives every day before you use them, we wear disposable gloves when we’re working, and they’re discarded once they touch some surface other than the food itself. They take water samples and test the water quality.”

“These days pretty much everyone requires it,” she said, “like Costco requires it to sell anything to then, and more and more supermarkets, too.”

But back when the farm first received “Food Safety Certification,” in 2003, it was not the norm. “We were ahead of the game,” she said. “It was very unusual then, and everyone looked at us as if we were crazy because we were spending a few thousand every year to get audited. And it’s a lot of paperwork on top of whatever else we’re doing.”

It was primarily as protection for their workers that they started pursuing Food Safety Certification, which they received every year.

These days, “the employees are proud when we pass,” she said. “When it’s over and you tell them we did a good job, they give a sigh of relief.”

We Are Confident In Our Food Safety Procedures

Someone reports finding a slug on lettuce he bought that had our label on it. He says he bought it on Sunday at the Pahoa Farmers Market.

But we do not sell our lettuce at the Pahoa Farmers Market, and do not have vendors selling our product at any Farmers Markets. Apparently, and unknown to us, someone must have bought our lettuce and resold it. We did not have control over that lettuce. It could have been contaminated when out of our control. It’s also possible someone packed other lettuce into our container/label. There’s no way to know.

We only sell our products at Farmers Markets ourselves. If you see our product at a Farmers Market, come up and say hi. We’ll say hi and introduce ourselves, and you’ll be talking to me and/or members of my family.

For many years now we have been very proactive about slugs and slug-borne diseases. I have written about this here before.

We do not grow our lettuce in dirt. Instead, we grow our lettuce on floating rafts. The lettuce roots gets their nutrients straight from the water. This helps us to maintain a barrier from slugs.

We were the first company in the state to be third-party Food Safety Certified. We could have been satisfied with that, and just relied on our food safety certification (which is voluntary, and adds a lot of labor and cost to our operation, but is important to us). But we are serious about doing everything we can to protect our customers, so we took it one step further.

Although there haven’t been any cases of the slug-borne “rat lungworm disease” reported in Pepe‘ekeo, where our farm is located, we voluntarily instituted a program to cut the potential lifecycle of the rat lungworm (the carrier of the rat lungworm disease).

Because the disease lifecycle requires the rat lungworm to live part of its life in a slug and part in a rat, we developed a program of slug baiting and rat baiting/trapping to make sure that the cycle was cut. So on our farm, even if a slug got by us, the chance of it being infested with the disease is unlikely.

We sympathize with the person who found a slug, but we have carefully doublechecked our procedures and are confident they are working as planned.

I don’t blame him for feeling frustrated. But the world is changing and we need to be thinking of how we will help each other face the uncertain future together. We need to make strornger communities, we need to make more friends and we need to stay closer to our families. In an uncertain future, it will be the aloha spirit that will help us cope with an uncertain tomorrow.