Food Safety Begins At The Store

Whether I am making a quick trip to pick up a few dinner ingredients . . . or tackling a week’s worth of grocery shopping all at once, there are a few steps that I need to follow to ensure the food I bring home will arrive safely. And I know that those steps begin at the store.

When I am at the store I follow some simple guidelines:

• Select cold foods LAST
• Read the label for expiration and sell by dates
• Check the packaging for tears and leaks
• Inspect fresh produce
• Place meat, poultry, and seafood in sperate plastic bags
• Seperate foods in the grocery cart and the checkout lane to prevent possibility of cross contamination

Once I have the groceries packed for the drive home, there are some easy timing tips that I need to follow to continue to maintain their safety.

• Go straight home – I always make the grocery store my last stop if I am running errands. The key to keeping food safe is to refrigerate them within 2 hours.
• Do a weather check – When the outside temperature reaches 90˚F, you should refrigerate your purchased perishables more quickly – within 1 hour.
• If your grocery store is more than half an hour away from home, bring a cooler when you go shopping. Pack perishables in a cooler for the drive home.
• When you get home, unload your groceries right away to keep them safe, and refrigerate or freeze all perishables.

As an experiment I decided to purchase a pound of hamburger and kept track of the temperature to see just how quickly it would warm up in the store, check out lane, car, and on a trip to do some errands.  Below is a chart that plots the temperature of the meat and the time it took it to jump into the temperature danger zone.

12:00	36°F
12:30	47°F
12:40	54°F
1:00	60°F
1:45	67°F

After doing this little experiment, and seeing how quickly the temperature of the meat rose, it helps reinforce why I follow the above tips when shopping for food for my family to make sure I keep it as safe as possible. And I hope you have found the tips helpful too.