Processing
Are You Overlooking Important Food Safety Issues?
By Cliff Coles
With food safety, the little things matter. While a facility may seem clean over- all, successful sanitation and prevention of foodborne illness is about paying
attention to the minute details—details that
are easily overlooked. Microbes like
Salmonella,
E.coli and Listeria don’t always find their
way into processing facilities through obvious,
glaring sanitation problems. From a closer,
microscopic viewpoint though, a good food
safety audit can point out the little things that
could cause big problems. While at first some
of these details may seem a bit overly cautious,
it’s always important to err on the side of
safety when it comes to protecting the
health—and the lives—of your customers.
Setting Up a Food Safety Audit
A food safety audit needs to be a meeting
of the minds between the auditor and the facility management. Both parties need to understand the ultimate goal of the exercise: to
ensure the highest level of food safety possible. The facility management would usually
prefer to get the audit over with as painlessly
as possible without a list of fixes that break the
budget. While the auditor needs to respect financial constraints—let’s be perfectly clear—
there should be no compromise for food
safety. There may, however, be more than one
way to achieve it.
Regardless of an individual’s auditing tech-
nique, the auditor must be able to provide a
virtual tour of the facility through the written
word. If the audit is intended to be shared
with others, it’s essential to pick and choose
those words carefully, realizing that the reader
may have never been in that processing facil-
ity, let alone any processing facility. The audi-
tor needs to be part microbiologist, part
process engineer, part production manager,
part maintenance person, part salesman and
counselor to all departments. Auditors have
an obligation to teach and to share their ex-
periences seen through other audit situations.
This position also requires the ability to call it
like you see it and to be firm on the must do’s
and creative when it comes to should do’s. The
auditor should provide common sense op-
tions as to how the facility can meet the ex-
pectations of the audit and as well as the
regulatory requirements for providing safe
food.
Outside the Facility—
The First Line of Defense
Upon arrival at many facilities, several issues are immediately apparent before you
even enter the doors. These issues are often
overlooked because they are outside the facility—however, some situations actually invite
pests to come feed right at the very areas you
are trying to protect. Better to have the first
line of pest defense at the fence lines and a
second line at the building. Having stacks of
dirty crates, empty cans, old decommissioned
equipment in the yard and collections of
things that serve no purpose in remote areas
that are unattended will only provide comfortable living quarters for pests. Even the pretty
trees close to the loading dock can harbor
birds, which pose a multitude of food safety
hazards. While removing a tree may not be
something management wants to do, the
problem can also be addressed by adding col-
