So, you have your food business up and running with a basic food safety management system in place. Things are going well. How do you move your business forwards to its full potential? Many key components help drive business improvement. For example, business exposure, marketing, word of mouth from producing a good quality product. The challenge is to open the next lot of doors whilst keeping your existing customers happy and not causing production issues.
Defining Food Safety Accreditation
Accreditation is not just about creating safe food, it’s about having robust systems in place that can control any number of issues that can arise, showing your existing and potential customers you are aware of all potential hazards that could occur and are controlling them efficiently and to a high standard.
By moving your business forwards to obtaining a food safety accreditation such as SALSA, ISO or BRCGS you are showing the marketplace that your food business follows a well known and reputable standard.
Why Food safety Accreditation
The requirements of accreditation expect your business to have and maintain all pre-requisites in place. These include a full traceable system, a detailed and thought-out Haccp, Teams set up to investigate and control and potential issues that may arise. Premises set out in a safe manner for handling the type of product you produce or store, as well as, many other significant factors. This can give your potential customers and existing ones confidence in your product.
This provides a good base for starting any form of negotiations for a new customer contract. Also, help in keeping existing contracts ongoing.
See the benefits
The major advantage of accreditation is the requirement to have a strong food safety management system. This in turn aids your staff in keeping systems rolling as production or storage may start to vamp up. Many times, we have seen companies trying to run before they can walk, and this can apply to any business whether it is food or another non-food product.
Trying to do too many things without the foundations in place can mean corners get cut and product safety can be affected. Chaos can reign when a problem occurs. Having an accreditation in place means your system has already been tested. It is already robust and adaptable for when any issues occur.
Potential customers can see you have proved to the marketplace that your products are safe and legal. Remember, safe food sells.
New contracts can be won, older customers kept happy. Internal processes across the business can be made more effective.
Maximising Opportunity Food Safety Cultures
Another advantage to achieving a food safety accreditation is that as the world changes, so do the requirements set out by each standard. This therefore means your food business will move with the times. This includes awareness of any relevant legislation changes that may affect your product or business.
A new pre-requisite introduced into standards over the last few years is food safety culture. More emphasis is put back on to staff to understand the controls in place through staff training and know they understand the reasoning behind these rules and controls. If your staff don’t understand what they do and why they do it, the likelihood is that they aren’t going to be keeping to the rules you have in place. Busy periods, such as Christmas, can become a challenge.
Part of the food safety culture requirements help with getting this information across, obtaining feedback from staff to know that you as a business are providing the relevant information in a way that they understand and that systems allow them to physically carry them out in an efficient manner. Inevitably it helps you work as a fluid team, which is one of the many goals of any form of business.
Food safety accreditation can have a business wide positive impact. It means systems have to be maintained through regular internal audits and reviews.
