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Hi everyone! Got a question on producing chocolate sauce for shelf life and meeting food safety rules. Our chocolate sauce recipe base is cacao powder water and sugar. I'm under the impression that under food safety rules this would be considered a TCS food and is therefore subject to the "Refrigerate for 7 Days then Discard" rule, but maybe I'm wrong? One of our nationally distributed competitors sells a chocolate sauce with basically the same base ingredients, as I imagine most would, with a notation to "Refrigerate After Opening." What does one need to do in order to produce a chocolate sauce considered shelf stable until opening, and legally package it for sale? And would it require filing a HACCP plan? It seems virtually impossible to find information on doing anything like this online. Everything is either geared towards Cottage Food Rules or Mass Manufacturing Plant regulations. We just have a small commercial kitchen and want to be able to sell products safely and legally. Our Health Inspector is a nice guy, but he seems to not always really understand the ins and outs of things, so I hesitate to contact him with questions unless I'm already armed with the information that he can then run up the chain for me. Thanks so much!

I suspect you're right, I had the same thought. Everything is geared towards restaurant business it seems. There's so many FDA rules and I don't think anyone really knows them LOL. Our inspector is at least super chill. I can't imagine he'd give us trouble for anything we are doing according to industry norms. I think that's a good way to look at it - shelf stable and do our best to keep it from being sour or spoiled. Honestly if we had bonbons in the display cabinet I doubt we'd even be questioned on what ingredients were in them lol. I appreciate the warm welcome! 🙂

Sorry, got my people mixed up a bit in my response, I'm so tired lol. Meant to direct the aW Meter from Ali to Kerry. But as a new member I can't edit my post until it's approve so I'll just post this instead 🙂

It's really hard to find these rules or clarification on them. We are licensed by FDACS, Florida Dept of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Even figuring out if we were an FDACS or DBPR business was a challenge! There is some crossover between agencies, but generally DBPR deals with restaurants, food trucks, and hazard risk foods, whereas FDACS deals with prepackaged, bakeries, coffee shops, convenience stores, etc. It's very convoluted and even our inspector commented that half the time they need to sit down and really think about which agency governs certain businesses. Anyway, I digress... I can't find specifically anything relating to "confections" containing dairy. The closest I can find is this: https://www.fdacs.gov/content/download/72568/file/FOOD-STORED-WITHOUT-TEMPERATURE-CONTROL.pdf But I recall from my ServSafe Food Managers course that "prepared foods containing dairy" must be stored at <41 and discarded within 7 days. Dairy is considered a TCS Food, which is why home based food businesses operating under Cottage Food Law aren't permitted to sell goods with buttercream icing and cream fillings, for example. But nowhere in any text I read does it address confections or ganaches. I see PH and aW referenced everywhere, but no specifics on how to use that data to satisfy inspection requirements. The FDACS link above even says I need to send it out to a lab and have them confirm in writing that it's ok. That's ridiculous, I know nobody is doing that for every recipe, so that has to be pertaining to foods more hazardous than a bonbon. Webstaurantstore has a list of TCS Food storage times that they presumably got from the FDA. Using your cheese example, they list Soft Cheese such as Brie as a "discard after 7 days of opening," and hard cheeses as 3-4 weeks: https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/29/following-food-safety-temperatures.html Our confections business was previously operating under Cottage Food as a home based business and did a bunch of candy coated and baked items that, by law, didn't require any temperature consideration, including chocolate. We are outfitting our new store now and have a world of opportunity to make temperature sensitive goods, ganaches, filled chocolates, etc, but I want to make sure that we don't get anyone sick and don't get dinged by future inspections. There's not many Chocolatiers around our part of town (actually, none that I can think of) so our inspector wasn't tremendously helpful in answering hypotheticals and seemed to imply that they needed to be kept at <41F, but I'm certain I saw the chocolate display case at a Chocolatier across town set to 59F. Probably a call into their head office will be necessary to get any real clarification - but I was hoping someone that's been through this process on this forum might be like "oh yeah that rule applies to X and you need to do X" lol. @pastrygirl - would you mind sending me a private message with info on the AliExpress aW meter you got? There's a number of them available that I've looked at before but I'm always uncertain of which one to bet on vs which one will just waste my money lol. I won't hold you responsible if I end up with a dud, don't worry 😉

Hi everyone! Long time reader, new poster 🙂 My wife and I own a confectionery business in Florida and are venturing into various new product lines. Bonbons being specifically what this particular post is about. I'm familiar with the concepts of Water Activity. An aW meter is currently out of budget, but I know there's recipes around that show aW values. But here's my question: According to Florida food safety regulations, we are supposed to store things with milk ingredients at or below 41F, and discard them after 7 days. But I know that most people talk about ganache shelf life in terms of 3 weeks to 3-6 months, and Chocolatier display cases don't seem to be kept at 41F. How do the Chocolatier shop owners deal with this in terms of food inspections and legalities? Am I supposed to apply for a variance and submit a HACCP plan? Seems overkill for some ganache. And what if I don't have aW values and go with a different formulation for a filling? Do I default to the 41F/7-Day rules until I can test for aW? Shelf life and food safety is my biggest confusion as we venture into this side of the business and there doesn't really seem to be any resource anywhere that addresses it in terms of dealing with government agencies, but it's obviously done because Chocolatiers exist everywhere 🙂 Thanks!!