Risk Management Food Packaging is designed to protect food. Contamination occurs when damaged or opened packages expose food to bacteria, viruses, molds, insects, rodent droppings and urine, cleaning products and other toxics, broken glass, contaminated water or sewage, etc. Risk management deals with food safety, not food quality. Quality standards should be set up in addition to safety standards. For example, moldy bread is not safe and should be discarded. Stale bread, however, is safe but may not taste good. Whether or not you keep stale bread will depend on the size of your bread supply and your clients' demand for bread.

• Use your eyes and nose as first-round guides. If food looks or smells suspicious (if you have any doubts at all), throw it out.
• Contaminated food may be slimy, off-color or moldy. Remeber, however, that not all foods that cause food-borne illness will smell or look. bad.
• Never taste a donated product to determine food safety! You can't see the microorganisms that cause food-borne illness. The amount of Clostridium botulinum that would fit on the head of a pin can kill you.

First, discard the food in any obviously damaged packages in a safe manner (donate it to local pig farmers or composting grops or denature it with ivory soap or bleach and discard it in the trash or sewage. "Damaged packages" includes:

• packages with tears
• bottles with popped safety seals
• jars that have been opened
• medicine containers without safety strips
• leaking containers
• packages with insect or rodent holes
• stained paper and cardboard packages or packages that smell of a foreign material
• products with missing or opened seals
• any item which has been opened before it arrived at the food bank
• unlabelled or illegally labelled products

Mark the date received on all cases of product and on all undated individual items so that you can maintain product rotation and keep food only for a safe period of time.

If labels are damaged or dirty, re-label the product with the following information (using masking tape or self-adhesive labels and a permanent marker):

• Manufacturer
• Product
• Ingredients
• Weight
• Expiration date (If the product doesn't have one, assign one of your own using the keep date guidelines on pages 23-31 of Booklet 3.)

Sections 12 and 13 of SafeAid Booklet 3 give general recommendations on how long food can safely be stored at your food bank. If foods have been consistently stored at correct temperatures, they may be safe well after the "use by" date printed on the product

When determining how long to keep food, always be alert for mold, discoloration, slime and damaged packaging. These are sure signs that the food should be discarded. Also be aware that the nutrient content of fresh or packaged food decreases over time.