“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.
In this interview, FSSC 22000’s Dr. Jacqueline Southee talks about what’s new for the scheme, what changes are expected in 2015 and beyond, how these changes will affect you, and why it’s important to embrace these changes to be better prepared for upcoming food safety regulations such as FSMA.
Start preparing today for FSMA compliance. And SQF can help, says Robert Garfield, Senior Vice President, Safe Quality Food Institute.
