Food Safety and Quality Basics: External Support

Corporate level Food Safety Quality Assurance (FSQA) Strategies

So much is riding on your company’s ability to produce safe, high-quality food.  As a result, businesses in the food industry must prioritize food safety and quality to meet customer expectations.  Here are a few things to consider outside your factories that are key to supporting your company’s FSQA program:

1. Company FSQA Vision: A top-down approach is always best.  Communicate to all levels of your organization the need to produce safe, high-quality food products.  Meeting throughput metrics is important, but products that are unsafe or poor in quality will destroy a company.   Some ways to do this are:

   • Create company FSQA leadership materials from executive leadership such as videos, breakroom posters, etc. describing the company’s commitment to food safety and quality.

   • When meetings occur with team members to discuss efficiencies and people safety, include food safety and quality achievements or failures as well.  FSQA is a company/team initiative to provide amazing products for your customers.

2. Suppliers: Often manufacturers understand their base, core component well but forget that what they add to it to create niche food products in the marketplace is equally important.  Assuring that suppliers are certified by an internationally Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) for food safety such as BRC or SQF is one way.  However, if the supplier is not certified annually then consider sending someone to the supplier’s site to certify them until they can achieve certification. 

Many food recalls are result from substances that are undeclared often from a supplier, such as allergens or foreign material.

3. Temperature Control: How base, core components, ingredients and finished products are stored are also important in sanitary, temperature-controlled environments.

4. Corporate FSQA Policies & Procedures Manual: These are the basic programs that all facilities should follow such as:

   • Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) – the rules for hygiene that all food facilities should follow (for example – hand washing, hairnets/beardnets, smocks to cover street clothing, etc.)

   • Foreign Material Control requirements such as Metal Detection/X-ray

   • Shipping & Receiving requirements to include trailer temperature settings, cleanliness and security (trailer seals, etc.)

   • Base/Core company component shelf-life and storage policy requirements.  These describe how core company-produced materials (e.g., meat, poultry, produce, etc.) are stored and for how long to include any temperature requirements.

This is not an all-inclusive list.  Please reach out if you have questions or need assistance.

Steve Ford

faithfulfoodsolutionsllc@gmail.com

479.652.1389