Many elements can help ensure food safety compliance in any food business.
Food safety compliance evolves around management processes all working together to control food production risks. They aim to continuously produce a good supply of safe food and play their role in maintaining profitable businesses.
First Key Element of a Food Safety Management System: Commitment & Leadership
Food safety management systems cannot exist in isolation in any business. It requires goals that are in line with the overall business aims. Like any management goal, effective food safety systems require commitment. This does not just include food production staff. It starts from the attitudes of senior managers and their commitment in leadership to making food safety is a business priority and involving staff from all relevant departments, for example, ingredient buyers.
Commitment is needed because ensuring food safety compliance means rising to the challenge of meeting frequent routines, checks and reviews. Technology has helped with these processes because handheld devices with relevant software can capture data from these routines. Management reports created from this data can make food safety decisions more rapid.
Food safety leaders armed with better decision-making tools must also show commitment to their staff and communicate on all aspects of the process, even to say, everything is fine.
Part of the commitment towards food safety is ‘owning’ your food safety system. By knowing and understanding the workings of the systems created within an individual business, the ownership process begins. Food safety does not work from a manual because it is a continuous, living management system.
Managing Risk
At the core of ensuring food safety compliance is the plan for managing risk or HACCP. A HACCP plan is a legal document outlining processes, the risks involved and the controls in place to help mitigate those risks.
Food safety accreditation to food standards, such as BRCGS or SALSA Food has HACCP at their centre.
Managing risk starts from being able to trace all ingredients and their suppliers through to warehousing, distribution then retail or the foodservice sector.
The Mechanical Elements of Compliance
To assure food safety compliance, there are many components that need to work together in forming effective processes.
Firstly, the design and implementation of the fabric of the building and facilities. To help ensure compliance, the building fabric needs to be in good condition and washable so cross-contamination is mitigated. Having a suitable design to ensure there are utilities and sufficient space so the flow of production or storage maximises the ability to ensure food safety compliance.
Understanding machinery and being proactive in its maintenance is another key element in ensuring food safety. Any machinery in the production, warehousing or distribution of food requires a suitable cleaning schedule and maintenance regularly.
External contractors can maintain machinery and also carry out pest control. Pests change at different times of the year and to mitigate contamination risk, pest control forms part of a HACCP.
Effectively dealing with waste is another element in compliance to consider. Staff training in understanding what and why is waste and how it must be effectively managed is important again to avoid cross-contamination.
Hygiene in its many forms is large of ensuring food safety compliance. Hygiene can cover personal staff hygiene schedules, in terms of, protective clothing, hand washing, reporting sickness, etc. It also covers the hygiene of the total environment of food production, storage, warehousing or distribution.
Adequate Resources
Most food or product businesses when they begin implementing food safety processes do not appreciate the level of resourcing needed. This applies to preparing and passing a food safety standard, in particular.
A food safety consultant can, at the beginning, of a food safety accreditation process explain the level of resources required. This can be partly based on an initial report of the site and its current systems.
