Meet internal audit requirements for GFSI certification and ensure robust compliance by registering for ASI’s LIVE training– “Principles of Internal Auditing.” Rooted in the principles of ISO 19011, this course will help your team master quality from the inside out and avoid the most flagged non-conformances associated with Internal Auditing.
Food safety audits are critical for food and beverage operations and are critical in building a strong food safety culture. Whether preparing for a retail food safety audit or striving to meet scheme or standard audit requirements, auditor calibration can provide value to ensure auditors fully understand and abide by program rules. The authors describe how auditors can utilize auditor calibration to establish a stronger food safety culture and meet certification requirements.
Food safety audits are critical in building a strong food safety culture. Whether preparing for a retail food safety audit or striving to meet scheme or standard audit requirements, auditor calibration can provide value to ensure auditors fully understand and abide by program rules.
Understanding Auditor Calibration
Auditor calibration ensures that auditor knowledge and capabilities stay consistent and current with the latest certification requirements. This process involves developing a thorough uniform checklist, proper site preparation, comprehensive auditor training and internal onboarding. This sets all parties up for success, creating a universal food safety culture with all stakeholders understanding their role in the audit process.
Many food safety standards, such as those that fall under the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), require consistent, ongoing interpretation and understanding of standard requirements. Both GFSI and unaccredited programs list auditor expectations step by step. An effective auditor calibration program can ensure that auditors speak the business’ language, understand its market and follow its program rules to meet food safety standards such as GFSI.
Steps to Using Auditor Calibration
The first step to implementing auditor calibration is developing onboarding training for all parties involved. Onboarding can include basic information with customized training for each program type based on the auditors’ existing skills and experience.
Additional training should include specifics regarding the audit program’s requirements, report-writing guidance and other foundational information. An induction form can be used as a checklist and be updated over time, providing the auditor with a template document that outlines what is expected and what they have already completed.=
Once onboarding is complete, auditors should maintain regular training and professional development. For example, GFSI program leaders often hold calls on specific topics of interest, including new requirements, pain points in the audit process, the process flow and the meaning of different triggers.
Adult Learning Principles
Effective training isn’t just about information transfer; it’s about engaging adults as active participants in their learning journey. Leveraging key adult learning principles ensures that training resonates and transforms behavior. When training programs align with adult learning principles, auditors are more likely to understand, retain and apply the knowledge. This leads to better performance and a more skilled team.
Proper training grounded in adult learning principles is an investment in knowledge and the sustained growth and success of both individuals. Here are a few ways to ensure training is effective:
Training Resources
In addition to working with an auditor training service provider, several resources can help organizations implement auditor calibration.
Witness audits are conducted for new and experienced auditors. Before the audit is conducted, the basic expectations of the process, timing and expected audit document completion, and other details about the process are covered with the auditor to ensure a successful outcome. In this manner, the auditor is periodically refreshed on the expectations of their role. Witness audits are required regularly for GFSI-qualified auditors on a frequency specific to each program.
Improving Audits with Auditor Calibration
Auditor calibration can play an important role in ensuring consistent outcomes. At NSF, we have seen firsthand that by setting expectations for the audit team in a clear, concise manner, together you can meet a commitment to excellence. With a solid training program, you can develop a strong team of calibrated auditors who are consistently onboarded and trained. This consistency ensures clarity, support and access to information and smart questions, improving audit quality in the field.
Editors Note: Food Safety Auditor Training is offered at the Food Safety Consortium Conference, October 20-22, 2024 in Washington DC. This 4-part series is designed to provide the knowledge, behaviors and technical skills attributed to a competent food safety auditor. More information.
Additional Resource: What Does It Take to Be a Food Safety Auditor? On Demand Webinar
EAGLE Certification Group’s Brad Rush and Vital Farm’s Robert Clark are the recipients of the 2024 SQF Excellence Awards, presented by the Safe Quality Food Institute (SQFI), a division of FMI – The Food Industry Association. The winners were announced this week at the 2024 SQF Unites conference in New Orleans. Rush was recognized with the Excellence in SQF Auditing Award while Clark received the Excellence in SQF Practitioner Leadership Award.
The Excellence in SQF Auditing award is presented to a credentialed SQF auditor who demonstrates exceptional performance and dedication to the SQF program through high-quality audits, professional development activities, leadership and mentorship skills, and promotion of food safety culture.
In honoring Rush, SQF stated that as lead auditor for EAGLE Certification Group, Rush stands out as a gold standard in auditing within the SQF program, embodying a rare blend of specialized knowledge, unwavering dedication, and genuine passion for fostering industry-wide advancement.
“Brad is passionate about cultivating the skills of emerging auditors and imparting knowledge about food safety and the auditing profession,” said Jessica Osborne, chief program officer at EAGLE Certification Group. “His exceptional expertise naturally positions him as a mentor to newcomers in the field.”
The award for Excellence in SQF Practitioner Leadership is given to an SQF practitioner within an SQF-certified site who demonstrates extraordinary leadership and promotion of food safety at their workplace.
Clark is a quality assurance manager who leads a 21-person food safety and quality assurance team at Egg Central Station, Vital Farm’s egg washing and packing facility. He spearheads his team and delivers a variety of food safety, quality assurance, and continuous improvement projects and training throughout the year to ensure robustness in the SQF program.
“Robert is truly a trailblazer for food safety culture, and it is evident to everybody who has the joy of working with and for him,” said Liang Bennett, senior manager, co-manufacturing quality at Vital Farms. “His ability to engage his audience and get them to understand the reasoning behind why we have to follow food safety protocols and rules is fascinating to watch.”
The foodservice and retail industry has struggled to keep up with the curveballs thrown at it during this pandemic. “Whether reopening dining rooms after extended closures or finding their footing in a world of new omnichannel ordering, quick service restaurant and fast casual managers are grappling with evolving rules and regulations, changing diner preferences, while also welcoming an entirely new workforce,” says Michael Sperber, a global business manager for UL Everclean, a third-party retail food safety and sanitation audit program that helps retail foodservice businesses improve their food safety practices. In a Q&A with Food Safety Tech, Sperber discussed the evolving challenges in the foodservice and retail space over the past 15 months.
Food Safety Tech: On the issue of sanitation and cleanliness, what hurdles do restaurants and grocery stores have in the face of the pandemic and the subsequent labor shortage?
Michael Sperber: Trust in the safety and cleanliness of restaurants and grocery stores is one of the bigger concerns that must be addressed as consumers continue to navigate the pandemic. Consumers now have a higher expectation for their own health and well being, and expect establishments they visit to meet their needs and [doing so] while embracing heightened health and safety protocols.
FST: What steps should they be taking to identify and reduce potential health and safety risks?
Sperber: Amidst new challenges, guidelines and expectations, restaurants continue to have the critical responsibility of offering sanitary eating spaces and food preparation practices that help prevent diners from getting foodborne illnesses. There are several ways that restaurants can do this including:
FST: Discuss the role of employee training in this process, and how organizations should move forward.
Sperber: Training employees in food safety and customer interaction is a vital step in protecting employees and guests from foodborne illnesses. Employees who recently started at a restaurant when it reopened might not be aware of the dangers of foodborne illnesses or basic food safety protocols.
As restaurants reopen, when more and more guests have safety at the top of their mind, they should completely reboot their food safety programs, beginning with basics of safe food handling and foodborne illness. Repetition is a good way to reinforce the importance of food safety, and it may be beneficial to provide multiple training videos, pose questions on food safety during the interview and training process and include food safety on periodic employee reviews. Infractions among employees should result in retraining. This level of repetition communicates the importance of the issue.
A focus on employee training will help lead to a culture of food safety where everyone from the corporate CEO to the manager and janitorial staff feels accountable and can understand the consequences of failure to follow proper protocols.
This week’s episode of the 2021 Food Safety Consortium Virtual Conference Series will discuss the challenges that the industry faces in managing the supply chain, including in the realm of audits. The following is the agenda for this Thursday’s session:
This year’s event occurs as a Spring program and a Fall program. Haven’t registered? Follow this link to the 2021 Food Safety Consortium Virtual Conference Series, which provides access to all the episodes featuring critical industry insights from leading subject matter experts! Registration includes access to both the Spring and the Fall events. We look forward to your joining us virtually.
The legal cannabis-infused products industry is growing with impressive and predictable rapidity. But because the rollout of new regulations occurs in an awkward and piecemeal fashion, with stark differences from one state to another, and sometimes even one county to another, uncertainty reigns.1 Many entrepreneurs are diving headlong into the nascent industry, hoping to take advantage of an uncertain regulatory environment where government audits and inspections are rare. These business owners will see quality assurance and product safety as burdens—costs to be avoided to the greatest extent possible.
I have seen this time and time again, even in the comparatively well-regulated food industry, and it is always a mistake.
If you find yourself thinking about quality assurance or food safety as a prohibitive cost, annoyance or distraction, I encourage you to change your thinking on this issue. The most successful businesses realize that product safety and quality assurance are inextricably linked with profitability. They are best thought of not as distractions, but as critical elements of an efficient and optimized process. Proper QA and safety are not costs, they are value.
Food safety and quality assurance should be seen as important elements of the process that you undertake to enforce the high standards and consistency that will win you repeat customers. The fact that they guard against costly recalls or satisfy meddlesome auditors is only a bonus. Realizing this will make your business smarter, faster and more profitable.
Learn more about the science, technology, regulatory compliance and quality management issues surrounding cannabis at the Food Labs / Cannabis Labs Conference | June 2–4, 2020If today you cannot clearly communicate your product standards to your employees and to your customers, then you have some work to do. That’s because quality assurance always begins with precise product specifications. (A good definition of “quality” is “conformance to specifications.”) How can you assess quality if you don’t have a definitive standard with which to evaluate it? My consulting firm works with food businesses both small and large, and this is where we begin every relationship. You might be surprised how often even a well-established business has a difficult time naming and describing every one of its products, let alone articulating objective standards for them.
This may be doubly difficult for fledgling businesses in the cannabis world. Because the market is so new, there are fewer agreed-upon standards to fall back on.
When we help businesses create specifications, we always look at the relevant regulations while keeping in mind customer expectations. In cannabis, the regulations just aren’t as comprehensive as they are for conventional food and agriculture. Laws and guidelines are still in flux, and different third-party standards are still competing for market dominance. Different states have entirely different standards, and don’t even agree, for example, whether cannabis edibles should be considered pharmaceuticals or food. To some extent, it’s the wild west of regulation, and as long as the federal government remains reluctant to impose national guidelines, it’s likely to remain so.
The wild west may be a good place for the unscrupulous, but it’s not good for business owners that care about the health of their customers and the long-term health of their brand. Don’t take advantage of confusing quality and safety standards by doing the least possible to get by. At some point there will be a scandal in this country when a novel cannabis product makes dozens of customers sick, or worse. You don’t want it to be yours.
With cannabis-infused products, there is a unique additional factor at play: The strength of THC and other psychoactive compounds. Again, there are few agreed-upon standards for potency testing, and relatively little oversight of the laboratories themselves. This allows labs to get sloppy, and even creates an incentive for them to return inflated THC counts; at the very least, results may hugely differ from one lab to another even for identical products.2 Some labs are ISO 17025 accredited, and some are not. Using an unaccredited laboratory may prevent your efforts to create consistent and homogeneous products.
Even in comparatively well-regulated states, such as Colorado, it is ultimately your responsibility to create products that are safe and consistent. And in the states where the politicians haven’t even figured out which department is regulating cannabis products, your standards should be tougher than whatever is officially required.
And so we look to the more established world of conventional food and agriculture as a guide for the best practices in the cannabis industry.
The most constructive way to look at food safety, and the way your (eventual) auditors and regulators will view it, is to look at your product and process from the perspective of the potential hazards.
Some day, when regulation finally gets sorted out, you are likely to be asked to implement a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) safety system. HACCP framework recognizes three broad categories of hazards:
All of these hazards are highly relevant to cannabis-infused product businesses.
The HACCP framework asks us to consider what steps in our process offer us the chance to definitively and objectively eliminate the risk of relevant hazards. In a cannabis cookie, for example, this might be a cooking step, a baking process that kills the Salmonella that could be lurking in your flour, eggs, chocolate or (just as likely!) the cannabis extracts themselves.
A good HACCP system is merely the capstone resting atop a larger foundational system of safety programs, including standard operating procedures, good manufacturing practices, and good agricultural practices. It’s important to use these agreed-upon practices and procedures in your own facility and to ensure that your suppliers and shippers are doing the same. Does your cultivator have a culture of safety and professionalism? Do they understand their own risks of hazards?
HACCP offers a rigorous perspective with which to look at a process, and to examine all of the places where it can go wrong. The safety system ultimately holds everything together because of its emphasis on scrupulous documentation. Every important step is written down, every time, and is always double-checked by a supervisor. It sounds like a lot of paperwork, but it is better viewed as an opportunity to enforce consistency and precision.
When you thoroughly document your process you’ll create a safer product, run a more efficient business, and make more money.
Matrix Sciences International, Inc. has announced the acquisition of Savour Food Safety International and Savor Safe Food, organizations that provide consulting, auditing and training services in food safety and quality, and product development.
“Gina and her teams have built two strong companies with outstanding reputations that come from providing a unique level of service to their customers,” said Robert Wiebe, CEO of Matrix Sciences, in a company press release. “This strategic investment adds to the scope and depth of our Advisory business and has real linkage to our other services. ” Gina (Nicholson) Kramer is the executive director of Savour Food Safety International and also a member of Food Safety Tech’s Editorial Advisory Board. She will continue to serve in the same role and said the acquisition will not change how Savour Food Safety does business. However, the deal will give the firm access to new services, including laboratory testing, process validation, environmental monitoring program assessments, and R&D and sensory testing. “Matrix Sciences is creating an unparalleled team of expert services to provide customers with resources of a large company while maintaining a very focused, personalized approach to service for every client,” said Kramer.
Matrix Sciences has operations nationwide to address the needs of food and beverage industries and has grown through acquisitions of Richter International and Neumann Risk Services as well.
Gina (Nicholson) Kramer will be moderating Salmonella Detection & Control Sanitation Workshop at the 2019 Food Safety Consortium Conference & Expo.
2018 Recap: As VQIP implementation began, confusion among the accreditation bodies (ABs) and certification bodies (CBs) was clearly evident, and options for explanations from FDA were limited. To facilitate information sharing, AFSAP hosted an open gathering of all interested parties to hear from FDA. The inaugural AFSAP Auditing Stakeholders meeting provided a unique opportunity for the auditing community at large to interact with FDA and expand their knowledge on the regulatory use of audits in FSMA. CB attendees gained valuable insight into their hybrid role as part Scheme Owner under the Third-Party Certification Program (TPP) and its operational challenges in the global community. After vigorous discussion, the development of a consensus program for FDA’s TPP audits emerged, although the definitive mechanism to achieve this objective was still to be determined. AFSAP established a membership category for CB’s, and has continued to pursue solutions to these and other audit related issues, but information sharing has been limited to members.
2019: Although progress has been made, there is still a need for information sharing among all interested parties. Once again, the 2nd Auditing Stakeholders Meeting will be co-located with the Food Safety Supply Chain Conference in Rockville, MD, May 29–30, 2019.
AFSAP extends a gracious thank you to them for supporting AFSAP’s mission and goals.
The 2019 Auditing Stakeholder meeting will build on the TPP knowledge base, incorporating other areas that overlap with auditing and auditor development in general. FDA has a new TPP management team participating this year, along with some familiar faces from 2018. Join AFSAP in welcoming them to our event!
We have an exciting agenda planned for this year that includes a members-only session, an at-large session, and updates from FDA’s new TPP team. Association announcements will be provided after the Association’s members meeting has concluded.
AFSAP Membership Meeting
Auditing Community Meeting Highlights
Contact AFSAP for registration information: info@afsap.org
The Association for Food Safety Auditing Professionals is a member driven association created to advance and support the professional development of food safety auditors globally. As a 501(c)(3) Trade Association, AFSAP provides a universal platform for individual auditors and the auditing community at large to harness their combined experience and knowledge into a powerful tool equal to the significant challenges that lie ahead. Working together, AFSAP members will have an unprecedented opportunity to engage regulatory agencies and external stakeholders with a unified voice, and collaborate on the development of creative solutions to the issues facing the food safety auditing industry.
A food company’s supply chain can be the weakest link in their food safety program. Food ingredient adulteration, fraud, and counterfeiting negatively impacts everyone in the food supply chain. FDA has recognized the risk in the food supply chain. Sanitary transportation and the Foreign Supplier Verification Program (FSVP) are major components of FSMA. The Food Safety Supply Chain Conference addresses best practices, and new tools and technologies that can help food companies, including manufacturers, retailers and food service companies protect their brands and customers from food safety threats in their supply chain while being compliant with regulators.
You would be forgiven for thinking that food fraud is a sporadic issue but, with an estimated annual industry cost of $50 billion dollars, it is one currently plaguing the food and drink sector. In the UK alone, the food and drink industry could be losing up to £12 billion annually to fraud.
As the scale of food fraud becomes more and more apparent, a heightened sensitivity and awareness of the problem is leading to an increasing number of cases being uncovered.
Recently: Nine people contracted dangerous Vibrio infections in Maryland due to mislabeled crabmeat from Venezuela; food fraud raids have been conducted in Spain over fears of expired jamon re-entering the market; and authorities seize 1 ton of adulterated tea dust in India.
Spurred by the complexity of today’s global supply chains, food fraud continues to flourish; attractive commercial incentives, ineffective regulation and comparatively small penal repercussions all positively skew the risk-reward ratio in favor of those looking to make an extra dollar or two.
The 2013 horsemeat scandal in Europe was one such example, garnering significant media attention and public scrutiny. And, with consumers growing more astute, there is now more onus on brands to verify the origin of their products and ensure the integrity of their supply chains.
Forensic science is a key tool in this quest for certainty, with tests on the product itself proving the only truly reliable way of confirming its origin and rooting out malpractice.
Current traceability measures—additives, packaging, certification, user input—can fall short of this: Trace elements and isotopes are naturally occurring within the product and offer a reliable alternative.
Like measuring the attributes of ridgelines on the skin of our fingertips as a unique personal identifier, chemical fingerprinting relies on differences in the geochemistry of the environment to determine the geographic origin of a product—most commonly measured in light-stable isotopes (carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, oxygen, hydrogen) and trace elements.
Which parameters to use (either isotopes, TEs or both) depends very much on the product and the resolution of provenance required (i.e. country, farm, factory): Isotope values vary more so across larger geographies (i.e., between continents), compared to smaller scales with TEs, and are less susceptible to change from processing further down the supply chain (i.e., minced beef).
The degree of uptake of both TEs and light isotopes in a particular produce depends on the environment, but to differing extents:
TEs are related to the underlying geochemistry of the local soil and water sources. The exact biological update of particular elements differs between agricultural commodities; some are present with a lot of elements that are quantifiable (“data rich” products) while others do not. We measure the presence and ratio of these elements with Inductively Coupled Plasma—Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) instrumentation.
Light Isotopes are measured as an abundance ratio between two different isotopes of the same element—again, impacted by environmental conditions.
Carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) elements are generally related to the inputs to a given product. For example, grass-fed versus grain-fed beef will have a differing C ratio based on the sugar input from either grass or grain, whereas conventionally farmed horticulture products will have an N ratio related to the synthetic fertilisers used compared to organically grown produce.
Oxygen (O) and hydrogen (H) are strongly tied to climatic conditions and follow patterns relating to prevailing weather systems and latitude. For ocean evaporation to form clouds, the O/H isotopes in water are partitioned so that droplets are “lighter” than the parent water source (the ocean). As this partitioning occurs, some droplets are invariably “lighter” than others. Then, when rainfall occurs, the “heavier” water will condense and fall to the ground first and so, as a weather front moves across a landmass, the rainfall coming from it will be progressively “lighter”. The O/H ratio is then reflected in rainfall-grown horticultural products and tap water, etc. Irrigated crops (particularly those fed from irrigation storage ponds) display different results due to the evaporation, which may occur over a water storage period.
Sulphur (S) has several sources (including anthropogenic) but is often related to distance from the sea (“the sea spray effect”).
Analysis of light isotopes is undertaken with specialist equipment (Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry, IRMS), with a variety of methods, depending on product and fraction of complex mixtures.
Regardless of the chemical parameter used, a fingerprinting test-and-audit approach requires a suitable reference database and a set of decision limits in order to determine the provenance of a product. The generation of sample libraries large enough to reference against is generally considered too cost prohibitive and so climatic models have been developed to establish a correlation between observed weather and predicted O/H values. However, this approach has two major limitations:
To be able to read this data and establish decision limits that relate to origin (i.e., is this sample a pass or fail?), the parameters that are most heavily linked to origin need to be interpreted, using the statistics that provide the highest level of certainty.
One set of QC/diagnostic algorithms that use a number of statistical models have been developed to check and evaluate data. A tested sample will have its chemical fingerprint checked against the specific origin it is claimed to be (e.g, a country, region or farm), with a result provided as either “consistent” or “inconsistent” with this claim.
Chemical fingerprinting methods do not replace traditional traceability systems, which track a product’s journey throughout the supply chain: They are used alongside them to confirm the authenticity of products and ensure the product has not been adulterated, substituted or blended during that journey.
A product can be taken at any point in the supply chain or in-market and compared, using chemical fingerprinting, to the reference database. This enables brands to check the integrity of their supply chain, reducing the risk of counterfeit and fraud, and, in turn, reducing the chance of brand damage and forced product recalls.
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Third-party audits are critically important to food companies. They are the primary tool your customers use to determine if adequate food safety systems are in place. This article covers some of the strategies and tactics you should employ to maximize your chances of a successful audit.
A big audit is coming up. The plant has been preparing for months and this is the final team meeting before the auditor arrives. At some point during the meeting the plant manager turns to the QA manager and says, “Are you ready for the audit?” The QA manager swallows hard and responds, “As ready as we are going to be.”
So much stress and so much pressure just to get a “good score”. Corporate wants to know what happened before the auditor even leaves the plant. Performance evaluations, raises, year-end bonuses and sometimes even jobs are at risk. It’s no wonder people worry about audits so much.
What if I told you it doesn’t have to be that stressful? It doesn’t if you implement some of the things I have learned over the years.
I informally define an audit as verification that things are being performed to established rules. Those rules can be a customer contract, an audit scheme such as SQF or government regulatory standards. For this article, we are going to talk specifically about independent third-party audits.
An auditor is a person.
It’s easy to forget sometimes. They are people with their own story, training and experience. They may be a retired QA director from a major food company with decades of experience. They may be a former plant QA manager in the automotive industry with no food experience. This may be their first audit. They have a story and that will influence your audit.
Few people know that you can choose who audits you. Make sure the person who is coming in to evaluate your plant has the right experience and temperament to work with you. Ask the audit company to provide you with three to five resumes of auditors that they would like to send to your facility. Arrange for interviews with them and choose the one that fits best. You are looking for the right mix of experience and temperament. You don’t have to take who they want to send.
An audit is an answer to a series of specific questions and how you meet them. This is key to how you should approach an audit. The PDCA model is an ideal way to remember this point (see Figure 1).
Let’s address these one at a time.
