Safety

 The goal is creating joy, not experimenting on people, and with a few simple considerations, it is easily within your skills to develop safe beverages to serve and sell. The primary rule is to use flavours at natural levels as much as possible and most of the guidance available uses these levels. But plenty of room exists to increase levels to give your product a highlight or punchy flavour. The trick is knowing when and how to do that, and that is what this course will provide. 

Flavour compounds are used at levels in parts per million (milligrams per litre (mg/L)), and if you are unfamiliar with this, by the end of the course, you will understand it. For example, cinnamon bark essential oil is typically used at 5 parts per million (ppm), equivalent to 5 mg of cinnamon oil in 1L of liquid. This level of flavour can seem light, but the goal is not to overload a person’s senses. You want people to taste the flavours briefly, clear their palette, and prepare for the next sip. If you use too much flavour, a long lingering effect can be unpleasant, much like when a drink is too sweet.

As you learn, you may make a sample with excess flavours, and it should be known that even at five times the recommended levels, there are no short-term health issues associated. 

Cleanliness and sanitation are the best starting points. You can’t have contamination if there are no pathogens to infect your beverages.

Early on in your beverage-making journey, you will need to be a jack-of-all-trades and have a basic understanding of producing safe beverages, as you grow and your sales increase you will be able to depend more on the resources that increased income brings, like copackers and flavour scientists. Copackers can often do safety assessments or hire people to prepare documentation when you begin to distribute products. Distributors like Sysco require most of this information for quality control and insurance. It is typically not required for small-scale distribution as long as the product is made using good manufacturing practices (GMP).

You will find a small number of substances are banned—about 25, including sassafras and coumarin—and these are not arbitrary. One major misunderstanding by the public about safety limits is they think it is about a single dose, but when a toxicology study is done, they look at total exposure over the period of a year and take all sources of food and beverage. Yes, researchers look at the total amount of food consumed in a country and factor that out to an average individual’s exposure. That data comes from imported foods, farmers’ regional production and companies’ sales. It is a rough, often exaggerated dose for the average person, but for 20% of the population, this may extend their life. These toxicology reports are often reviewed every few decades as more data (illness rates, cancers, etc.) becomes available and data scientists can correlate it to exposure of compounds in food. This is a long slow process and that is why you will see a compound removed from the FEMA GRAS list occassionally.