A seafood processing plant in Malaysia owned by TS Food Industry Sdn. Bhd. is in serious violation of the seafood Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) regulations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

An FDA inspection team visited the facility Oct. 18 and 19, 2016m finding problems that the company did not adequately address. As a result, the agency sent TS Food a warning letter on Feb. 28 with specifics that must be addressed. The letter was just made public in recent days.

The facility makes air-packed surimi. The warning letter outlines the short-comings as follows:

1.The firm’s HACCP for cooked surimi does not list the critical control points for controlling the food safety hazard of pathogen growth and toxin formation, including the following processing steps:

• ambient refrigerated temperatures for thawed frozen pasteurized thread fin bream surimi.

• limit unrefrigerated processing time to 3 hours or less.

2.Internal temperature monitoring should be conducted every 2 hours, and chiller temperatures visually checked fairly during storage.

3. Under the corrective action plan for cooling, it is recommended moving product to another chiller and notifying maintenance.

FDA asked for a response from the Malaysian company within 15 days and without corrective actions FDA might well place the surimi under import alert, making it subject to detention without physical examination.

“Your response should outline the specific things you are doing to correct these violations, ” FDA wrote. “More specifically, your response should include documentation and information that would assist us in evaluating your corrections, such as documentation reflecting the changes you made, such as a copy of your revised HACCP plan, five (5) consecutive days of completed monitoring records (i.e., complete sets of monitoring records for the production of 5 production date codes of products) to demonstrate implementation of the plan, and any additional information that you wish to supply that provides assurance of your intent to fully comply now and in the future with the seafood HACCP regulation.”