Quality Control at Kinnkinnick Foods

Guaranteeing food is safe and scrumptious is a major challenge in the gluten-free world. 

Watch the video and meet Neharika Saini, Quality Control Supervisor, and her team, Hank, Amy & Esther. Five days a week they follow strict safety protocols at Kinnikinnick foods to guarantee our products come to you safe and scrumptious. 

Discover how ingredients are covered by manufacturer guarantees and are also quarantined on entry into our dedicated gluten-free facility. Only when each ingredient is tested for gluten, dairy, nuts, peanuts & soy, do we release it for production. 

See how ingredient samples are tested using a strict protocol. First, we dissolve ingredients with solvents, place them in a centrifuge to create a liquid sample for testing using ELISA kits, specifically to test for the presence of the five allergens we test for.  Once extracted the sample is tested using a spectrophotometre which prints out a value and shows if the allergen is present or not.  We test ingredients for gluten to a value of 5 parts per million. The legal requirement is 20 ppm to be allowed to declare a product gluten-free.

Also included in a wide battery of tests is one for water moisture, which is a major challenge in gluten-free baking. Moisture must be high enough so products don't dry out, but not so high as to lead to mold.

Long-term shelf life testing is also important, Neharika explains. Watch her go through the steps in her micro lab - extracting samples of finished products and accelerating decomposition to simulate eight months from the time of production to consumption.  

For those who worry about possible contamination with egg, Neharika shows the protocol for cleaning and testing our lines to ensure there is little risk from cross-contamination. This kind of thorough testing gives us the confidence to add a voluntary May Contain:  egg notice on our packages. However, if you are anaphylactic to egg, we do not recommend eating our products. We always err on the side of safety, which is our number one concern. 

Let us know what you think of the video and if there are any other behind-the-scenes subjects you'd like us to create videos for. There'll be one on product development coming soon.