Validating Heat-Treated Flour

Many of us have had to resist the urge to lick the bowl of the brownie mix or sneak a bite of cookie dough but many don’t resist the urge. The growth of ready-to-eat (RTE) flour can be traced to multiple food safety recalls, most recently in 2016, when the FDA investigated a multistate outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli infections linked to large domestic producer of flour. The impetus for these recalls stems from consumers consuming a not-RTE product (flour) prior to the kill step. After months of extensive testing, the pathogens E. coli O121 and E. coli 026 were detected in laboratory samples.