What about the state pure food boards? Do they follow the government lead in this matter or act according to their own ideas? Some follow the government and some do not. Some state officials are quite lenient while others are very strict. A product which one would pass as being all right, another would condemn. I have seen state officials condemn catsup which I am quite sure the government would pass, although it wasn’t as good as it should have been. If the manufacturer had cared to carry it to the courts there would have been an even chance of him winning out. However, the loss of prestige due to the publicity of such action is often greater than the loss of the manufactured goods would be and as a rule the manufacturer does not contest the case. Publicity is a powerful whip in the hands of the government and state officials.
Checking Up Daily Runs
What is the manufacturer to do about checking up his daily runs of pulp and catsup during the season? Is it better for him to send his samples to a commercial laboratory, or to employ an analyst to work at his factory, or to do the best he can in the sorting and in the factory routine, assuming that if he uses proper care here his products are sure to analyze all right and he doesn’t need to worry.
This problem has been discussed a great deal. To employ an analyst on the place is usually rather expensive for a small packer if the man is fully competent to do the work, and unless he is, he is worse than useless. To send samples to an outside laboratory often involves considerable delay in getting the reports, and by the time the results are known the goods are stacked away and almost forgotten. If they ran high in micro-organisms there was some cause for it, and that cause should have been remedied at once, and probably would have been had the analysis been reported within a day or two. Therein lies the chief advantage of getting an analysis quickly. An analysis on products which have been run a week previously is, of course, better than nothing, but it is far from being satisfactory.
The third method, that is, relying upon care in the factory and having no analysis made, was at one time recommended, but it is not now considered good policy. In a great many cases where this policy was adopted it was found out when it was too late that much of the goods that was thought to be all right was decidedly off. There were undiscovered errors in the manufacturing process, and they remained undiscovered because there was no means of checking them up.
My advice in this matter is to have an analyst trained for this work and employ him at your factory if you are so far from a reputable analyst that it will take some little time to get a report. The Research Laboratories of The National Canners Association at Washington is undertaking the training of men in this analytical work for those companies that desire it. If the packer is close enough to a reputable analyst to get a report within a day or two he will find that such an arrangement is usually satisfactory, and he should rush his samples with all possible speed, and request the analyst to wire the report if the analysis is high.
Then there is the problem of what laboratory to send samples to. Will any reputable chemical or bacteriological laboratory do for this purpose? Many packers have made a mistake right here, and the analyses they have received have been worse than nothing because they were not only grossly inaccurate but misleading. They have gone on thinking their goods were all right and have found out later by some accident that they were all wrong.
Although an analyst may be a good microscopist and fully competent to do general bacteriological or biological work, he cannot possibly get a correct microscopical analysis on tomato products unless he is familiar with the Howard method as used by Mr. Howard. This means that he must use the exact technique that Mr. Howard uses in his laboratory. Every manipulation, no matter how slight, must be made in precisely the same manner that Mr. Howard makes it; otherwise the results are worthless. An analyst, in order to be competent to use the method, must either work with Mr. Howard until he can check him on all kinds of samples, or he must work with one of the analysts that have been closely associated with Mr. Howard in this work. If the analyst has had factory experience and can assist the packer in running down the causes of high counts, that is a great advantage.
How to Interpret Analyses
We will say that a sample of pulp taken from one of the daily runs has been sent to an analyst, and the report on it is as follows: