Understanding food safety goes beyond just investigating the products and the production line on which they are manufactured. Let’s say that I have created the perfect food safety program for my products and production line.
I have work instructions for all possible tasks and activities. All employees are trained and tested on the work instructions. No employee works on the product production until they show a complete understanding of the jobs which they are responsible for completing. I have the greatest quality system manual ever put to paper.
I have thoroughly validated my process capability for all my quality and food safety checks. My sanitation program assures each day that the production line is free of any pathogens and allergen through continuous testing and offline validation studies.
I create as close to perfect products that anyone could hope to continuously provide to my customers.
Yet, I have repeated failures. My customers find pathogens in the products I ship to them. My customers find that the products I ship to them are mislabeled. My customers find that my product is spoiled yet still within shelf life. My customers find foreign material in the products. My customers find toxins or chemicals in the products I send to them.
What the hell!
I have failed to include hazard analyses, risk assessment and preventive controls both up and down streams from my production line. Let’s say that I actually did do a good job, in the beginning, developing a food safety program for my supply chain. What if my partner changes the recipe of their ingredient? If your partner changes the recipe, will all the supporting documents for credence claims still be relevant? What if I do not do the verification of the ingredient statement on the incoming ingredients against the specification? Then what happens to the process or allergen control on the production line? What if I did not get the necessary test data from the partner for toxin or chemical control? Or if I did and did not look at it, then have to recall of the product. What if I did not take into account the potential for foreign material contamination from a partner? Or include temperature requirement instructions to my shippers or customers.
Partner management is not about just collecting audits and food safety programs. Partner management is about the daily management of data to assure compliance with your food safety program. There has to be a means to have transactional communication to assure that changes in specifications are known, testing results are received and reviewed, issues are known and corrective action happens, partner instructions are delivered and verified, partner product hazards are identified and incorporated into food safety program.
Ask your Supply Chain Management team ”what are your metrics around partner performance”? Hopefully not just “well, I have greater than 95% of the GFSI audit certificates for my partners”.
You have to converge all data on food safety from both internal and external sources into a usable structure to drive performance. How do you do that?
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