John Kukoly of BRC Global Standards recently spoke about what changed with BRC standard this year, changes expected in 2015, how food facilities can prepare for these changes. Here are some excerpts.
From the auditor’s point of view, what’s most important when it comes to auditing your food safety plans and programs? What do they consider best practices for passing audits? What are the biggest no-no’s leading to deductions? SCS Global’s Sr. Technical Director and Auditor Heena Patel answers.
“Food defense is different from preventive controls and food defense cannot be prescriptive—it needs to be tied to a facility-specific risk evaluation,” says Shannon Cooksey, Senior Director at the Grocery Manufacturers Association.
How can you gain competitive advantage through supplier collaboration and effective supplier relationship management? William Michels offers some ideas.
Adopting a couple different methods of verification, such as ATP swabs and microbial testing, done in a couple dozen strategic locations throughout your plant, should suffice to verify that your plant has been properly cleaned and sanitized, says 3M Food Safety’s Camila Gadotti.
“A good training program needs to address why are we doing this, what is the reason and rationale behind the training. The WHY is as important as WHAT we need to do. Often times, trainers are great auditors, but bad trainers.” – Eurofins’ Gary Smith.
Training is a journey, not a destination. So start looking at training as the best investment you can make in your people, products and brands.
Implement these 10 concepts to bring training and education full circle, and to provide forward momentum in the process of developing a fully engaged and highly productive workforce.
Food companies are finding a substantial non-regulatory push for environmental monitoring from their customers. As a result, firms without environmental monitoring programs will soon find it challenging to escape criticism from inspectors, auditors, and customers. In this Q&A, Eurofins’ Dr. Doug Marshall speaks about his workshop on Environmental Monitoring.
Irrespective of what method you used to perform root cause analysis – the IT IS / IT IS NOT analysis, the 5 Whys analysis or the Fishbone analysis – it is critical to identify ALL possible causes by asking a LOT of questions, about your people, processes, raw materials, equipment, environment, and inspection systems, says Dr. Bob Strong , Senior Consultant at SAI Global Assurance Services.
