[Facility Management] Faith-Based Food Safety

A while back, I attended a very interesting conference sponsored by Marler/Clark, a leading food safety law firm, called "Who’s Minding the Store?" I heard a phrase used that caught my attention: Faith-Based Food Safety. It reflects many of my thoughts and experiences regarding the actual functionality of several food safety programs I have observed in fields and facilities worldwide. The concept behind the phrase is that many food safety programs, including related documentation systems, are developed by knowledgeable people and then turned over to the actual operational group with minimal, if any, training. Management proceeds with faith that the GAP, HACCP, GMP, or SSOP programs will be properly executed by a team of people with little or no background and/or specific training in the functional details of or specific reasons for these additions to their workload.

As the presenter elaborated on the concept, I thought of a number of specific examples in my own experience that applied. For example, in a fresh cut facility that produces a variety of pre-cut vegetable items, I discovered that both the automatic pH and chlorine monitoring systems were non-functional and hadn’t worked for a couple of days. I asked about records from the manual backup system and was met with blank stares. There was no manual backup system. I’m sure the management group had great faith in the expensive and well-designed automatic systems they had purchased as well as in the contract group that was supposed to monitor them.

In another example, I discovered a filthy interior of an intake wash line. It turned out that the daily cleaning procedure, which was well documented and followed, did not include the inside of the wash line. The inside was only on the weekly cleaning list. Not only had no one caught this obvious oversight, but those doing the weekly cleaning did not recognize the need for more frequent cleaning when confronted with the mess every week.

Faith may move mountains, but it will not ensure that the critical needs of your food safety system are being met. I generally find fewer issues in operations where the plant or field manager fully understands the process and the people, takes the time to visit them regularly, and even snoops around the corners of the equipment as we walk through.AIB

The author is Vice President/Produce Division, IEH Laboratories and Consultants.