From the Plant Floor

The Last 10 Years
By Brian Honigbaum

A lot has changed in the food safety world in the last 10 years. Increased regulation, more customer awareness and requirements, more testing, more…well, more of everything. We could spend countless days discussing what’s different and what’s changed. But instead, let’s focus on what hasn’t changed.

With all the changes and increased scrutiny over the last 10 years on what we do, we sometimes get so caught up in the details, we forget why we are here in the first place. This hasn’t changed.

We make food, and food made wrong can and will kill people.

That’s a pretty bold statement, but we all know it to be true. Whatever changes we have undergone, this simple fact remains the same. We are trying to protect our companies, and most importantly, protect our customers and our families. One of the first things I tell new employees at our plant is that every time they touch a piece of meat, it could be the piece of meat that goes into their mouths or their children’s mouths. This hasn’t changed. That awareness should never change regardless of the amount of “stuff” placed on us.

So my message isn’t about how GFSI has helped us, how we have six new strains of E. coli for which to test, how we should start to worry about antibiotic resistance, or even how our customers are more aware of how their food is made and what goes into it.

My message is simple: In everything you do, in every audit, in every policy, in every regulation, there is one thing that has not and cannot change. We make food that people eat, and food can kill them. As our jobs continue to get harder and more involved, as more regulations come out, as audit standards get more difficult, don’t ever lose sight of the big picture:

We make food, and food made wrong can and will kill people.

Stay a step ahead or you are already a step behind.

The Next 10 Years
By Bruce Ferree

Ten years of Quality Assurance and Food Safety Magazine—Congratulations! So what is the biggest change for quality and compliance teams in the past 10 years? I believe it is the advent and acceptance of the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI). While food safety has always been a top priority for companies and consumers, there continued to be high-profile recalls, quarantines, and negative publicity about the food industry. In addition, there was a level of audit fatigue throughout the manufacturing and distribution industry. Retailers performed inspections or audits themselves or asked a third party to do it on their behalf. Co-packers were audited by every one of their customers as well. These audits were often completed against food safety schemes that, while meeting the needs of an individual customer or retailer, lacked international certification and accreditation, resulting in incomparable auditing results.

Now we have audit schemes that are benchmarked against an international standard. Now there is a single standard (GFSI) to which virtually all the audit schemes are compared and benchmarked as equivalent. Most manufacturing and distribution plants have seen a reduction in audits because most customers and retailers accept any of the benchmarked schemes. So whether you are using SQF, BRC, CanadaGAP, FSSC22000, Global Aquaculture Alliance, GlobalGAP, Global Red Meat Standard, IFS, or PrimusGFS—your audits should be accepted by your customers.

If you’re like me, you now have fewer than 10 audits a year. In past years, I reviewed the operation with a different customer each week and sometimes twice a week. Now I’m able to share my GFSI benchmarked audit with all my customers, and I have time to actually work on program updates, innovation, and improvements. I can spend more time in the plant, completing training with staff or planning to make our next big product. GFSI has been great for us.

For plant operations staff, I believe they have seen additional time that can be spent assuring that programs and processes are adequate, appropriate, and followed by staff. There is also less confusion, because there are not conflicting expectations to be met for each customer.

I know that there have been many other changes in the past 10 years, including the major faux pas of several operators. We’ve been through the melamine recall because someone had an eye on profit instead of safety. We’ve endured the recalls of leafy greens and cantaloupe. And the USDA has implemented the “Big 6” coliforms for testing. We are mastering Listeria and E. coli 0157:H7 and gotten better at managing the cold chain of distribution. We’ve improved our food defense efforts, and we still have the safest food supply in the world.

The enactment of FSMA will certainly change our views and actions in coming years. The bottom line is that we are doing okay—but there are still things we need to improve. I’m looking forward to the next 10 years of Quality Assurance and Food Safety magazine to see what happens that we may not have expected.