Hi, I am John Swenson. I manage the Arkansas Food Innovation Center. We're part of the
University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, located in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
I'm here today to discuss how you go about obtaining your food manufacturing permit in
the state of Arkansas. It's possible that this could be applicable to another state,
but you'd need to check with your local health department.
So the first thing you would do is schedule a meeting with myself or the facility manager
of the facility you're going to — And we're going to discuss your recipe, how you want
to package, potentially how you want to market it, and look at do you have allergens in your
product, think about equipment choices we could come up with and you would start a paper
binder of all the paperwork you'll have to be doing.
The first thing we would do is prepare a test batch. So you would come into our kitchen,
make it just like you would at home. And what we're looking for is particle size of your
product, how you make it, how long you cook it, is this product safe, and then we would
make you weigh all your ingredients. We don't do anything by volume. Everything must be
weighed and everything must be done in a metric system.
And eventually you will want a nutrition facts panel, so this will be helpful in determining
that.
After that, we will do a product scale up. Here, we've predetermined that you're going
to use certain equipment. We would train you on this equipment, show you how to sanitize
that equipment and typically, when we do like a sauce, we do about 10 gallons, and the primary
purpose of this is, does it turn out like it did in your test batch? Are the particles
the same size? Does it taste the same? Not everything scales up in a linear fashion.
And if we need to, we would revise your ingredient list and remake that scale up batch.
So the first thing you would need to do is look at your what's called GMPs, Good Manufacturing
Practices. These are identified by the state you're in and also by the federal government.
And this is typically something you want to see how you sanitize things, what is your
product all about and an example I always give is ketchup.
Ketchup has what's called a standard of identity by the FDA, and it has to have a certain viscosity.
And if it doesn't have that viscosity, you can't call it ketchup. I mean, it's as easy
as that. And it's mainly because people in the past have cheated.
The next thing you'll do is you'll start writing what's called Standard Operating Procedures,
SOPs. So basically what these are is if you are to provide an SOP to myself with all your
ingredients and packaging, I could read it and mimic your product, make it, bottle it,
walk out the door. It has to be that detailed, this is what the state requires. So here I
have an example of what we call a simple SOP for plain yogurt.
If you look at the list here, you've got some ingredients, milk and a stabilizer and asks
you to standardize the mix, pasteurize it, homogenize it, mix it, package it, incubate
it, blast chill it. So the question here is, could you make this yogurt, and the answer
is no. I mean, nobody here would know how to do this.
There's just not enough information available. Plus there's no sanitation steps at all. We
don't know what we're doing.
So here's an example of an accurate well thought out SOP. It starts out put on a hairnet, wash
your hands, put on your gloves, sanitize a table, sanitize buckets, machines. You're
going to basically wash your vegetables. You're going to transfer vegetables to a bucket.
You're going to take them through a machine that's going to reduce the size of them. And
this goes on and on and on and on. So ideally, you want this for the Health Department, but
also, let's say you start growing and you hired an employee, this is your best vehicle
to train that person.
So the next thing you have to come up with is what's called Sanitation Standard Operating
Procedures or SSOPs. If you're fortunate enough to come to our facility, we've already done
these for you. But in essence, you have to define how you're going to sanitize everything
you use in that facility. So it could be the machines, it could be basically the tables,
any of your equipment you're using. What we've found is if you're not scrubbing a surface,
you're not removing what's called a biofilm and that's where a lot of these pathogens
can reside and we've done a lot of tests to prove this.
OK, next, you have to write up a recall and an allergen plan. So recall plan is, you know,
let's say somebody get sick. I mean, you need to go out to the community and tell everybody
this is a recall. You've got to go to all those stores that you've sold this product
to and recall that product.
It is wise to do what we call a mock recall. So let's say you're six months into your business,
you pick a random lot number that you produced a month ago, and you go back and see if you
can actually determine where you sold this product. So it's important to have a database
or spreadsheet or something to that effect that you can track this information.
Also, an allergen plan. So typically, unless you're going to have your own facility and
you're going to work in a place like our facility, it's shared use. So there are potentially
allergens in that facility. We limit areas for allergen use, so you won't have airborne
issues. But the person prior to you may have used soy sauce and one of the cattle, and
if they didn't properly clean, it's up to you to make sure you clean that. So you have
to define those types of things in your allergen plan.
Next, you have to sign up with the FDA. This is not very hard. But in essence, they need
to know your manufacturing food. The only gotcha on signing up with the FDA is if you're
working at a facility like ours, you're the company, we're the facility address. It's
a little confusing. We have instructions on how that can be done.
Also, if you have what's called acidified food, so typically barbecue sauce, salsas,
these are items in which an acid has been added like vinegar, lemon juice, etc., this
requires a separate form to be filed with the FDA. And it also requires what's called
a Process Authority Certification. And we have a professor within our office that can
do these and it generally will cost you around two hundred dollars per product.
The next thing the state requires is the Employee Training Schedule. So this is a very simple
one here, but basically, all this paperwork you've generated, you need to train your employees
on. If you're sick, you're gone. They need to take over. They need to be aware of all
these. You need to train these employees. So this is just a simple example of how you
would have a schedule.
Then we have to do a label for your food package. So there are FDA standards to what your label
should have. Generally, if I'm looking a label straight on, I'm going to see at the top your
company name, in the middle what the product is and it's something that, you know, needs
to say like salsa, so I know it's salsa and not some fancy name that I don't know what
it is and at the bottom, you have to have the weight or the volume of that product.
On the right hand side of your panel, you typically have the nutritional facts panel,
you'll have your address, you'll have the ingredient statement. So the ingredients could
be, let's say, tomatoes, lime, soy, water. Below that, you have to write contains soy
because soy is an allergen.
And on the left hand side of that label, typically is going to be your barcode and marketing
information that you want to have conveyed here customer base. I generally, in my case,
review all those. A lot of the software for labeling does not have spell check. So I always
definitely go through there and check that everything's proper.
Everybody that manufacturers food needs a food liability insurance. An example of this
is a place called Flip Program. They charge three hundred dollars a year, but this is
something you must have. You don't want to be sued if somebody gets sick.
Finally, you're going to schedule a meeting with a facility manager. And so the idea here
is that we go through all your paperwork, make sure it's done correctly, before you
send it to the state. And you have that binder available and we just go through the whole
thing. And then in the case of Arkansas, you're going to go and fill out their application.
The only confusing part of their application is it is set up in a manner that is for a
manufacturing facility. So it basically wants you to do a layout of your floor plan, where
your bathroom is located, etc., etc. In a case where you'd be working with us, you're
basically going to put our address in there and they know who we are. You can omit all
those steps, but it's not very hard to do.
But you'll take that application, you'll include the binder that we've gone through, mail it
to the Department of Health in Little Rock. There's an eighty five dollar fee to review
this plan and then part of that eighty five dollars is the thirty five dollar permit.
So once you get your permit, and the state does deliver those to you by hand, you would
schedule with us in the facility.
Generally we schedule out about two weeks in advance. And it's basically always done
by equipment. We have the flexibility of moving certain equipment around, and we are a small
space so we try to get this done in a manner that can facilitate the most amount people.
Upon arriving, we want to make sure that you understand your SSOPs and that you're cleaning
your equipment properly. So we will definitely be keeping an eye on you and make sure you're
doing that correctly.
Product storage. We are, again, a small facility. We don't have room for storage. We do ask
you to have a lot code, an expiration date on your product before you leave the facility.
And I'll just mention that you need to discuss storage options with the Department of Health.
You cannot store your product at home. They just won't let you. So you need to have some
kind of setup. That's something you can discuss with them.
So your responsibilities is basically everything. This is your company, your liability.
You need to be aware of all that paperwork you've filled out. I will provide you templates,
but you need to read it, you need to understand what you've got yourself into here. And as
far as our facilities are concerned, we're there to help, we're there to assist, we're
there to potentially police. But we are a rental facility, this is all your company,
and so we expect you to abide by our rules and do things in a safe manner.
So other considerations here are, you need to obtain a sales permit in the state of Arkansas.
So the permit you get from the state for manufacturing, that is just a permit that says I can manufacture
product. Then you need to get the sales permits so I can sell this product. And then as part
of that sales permit, you would enroll in what's called ATAP, Arkansas Taxpayer Access
Point, and really what that's all about is collecting tax money. And so you understand,
if you sell directly to a consumer, you need to collect tax. If you sell to a grocery store,
they're going to collect a tax.
So you need to have again, back to that database I discussed earlier, you need to have it set
up properly so you understand how much tax you're going to pay the state on this ATAP
system. It does calculate your tax based on sales, but you should have that. Just make
sure the numbers match. Also, you should have a business plan.
We do see people come in that really don't have an idea of what they're going to do,
and that's not a good way to start a business. You need to have a plan in place, goals in
place and you need to be persistent about following that business plan and marketing,
for that matter.
Some products like, let's say, barbecue sauce, it's a saturated market. How are you going
to differentiate yourself from those other companies? That's a very important step.
Finally, trademarks, patents. It's hard to patent food, but I would highly recommend
looking at trademarking your company name. I myself was a producer. I was producing for
about two and a half years, got into Whole Foods, got into Natural Grocers, quite a few
stores. Went to trademark my company name and my lawyer said no. It was a mistake on
our part. We had to go back and change everything. And trust me, it was not fun.
So I highly recommend you look into that. There is a website, the U.S. Patent and Trademark,
that you can just go in there and search.
It's fairly easy to just go in and, you know, pick parts of your name and search on them
and see what pops up.
That's all I have to discuss today. Thanks for your time.