Food safety culture for warehousing operations

Hello all, 

I am hoping that someone can enlighten me on food safety culture for warehousing operations!

I am the Quality Manager of a company that is BRC storage & distribution accredited (we also have a food safety certification for manufacturing).

I've just received a non-conformance against food safety culture (clause 1.1.2) as the auditor stated that although I had a plan and regular updates, there was nothing specific for warehouse staff in term of food safety culture.

I am struggling to find anything to put on my plan: we only dealt with packed food ingredients, no temperature control and we already have cleaning schedules which are followed (the auditor even complimented us on the cleanliness of our warehouse).

Has anyone has some ideas as to what I could add to strengthen our food safety culture in the warehouse?

Thank you all for your help.

Hi,

We base our 'culture' around the feedback about the KPI's that are relevant to the roles in the warehouse, a survey carried out annually to establish what the staff know and understand about the food safety culture and then have a plan based on the outcome of that. 

Google food safety culture australia and new zealand - loads of excellent information in there to help you expand what you already have.

Hi,

I work with a number of S&D sites in the UK and the food safety culture requirement can be tricky. here are some of the tools that I've used:

- cross departmental staff meetings so that issues that affect all departments can be raised & discussed (especially useful if they work different shift patterns and very rarely meet during a normal working week).

- suggestion box in the warehouse where ideas for improvement/feedback can be submitted

- cross departmental newsletters that include employee recognition/company performance feedback

- employee recognition schemes where staff have to nominate persons from other departments based on certain criteria i.e. communication/ friendliness /helpfulness etc.

-  getting staff involved in reviewing their job descriptions and identifying how and why they might want to progress within their roles/careers

-  annual staff appraisals with 360 feedback

Staff surveys are only one tool and if you are doing them annually then well done! I tend to keep those as a last resort once all other options have been exhausted and then only at 3 yearly intervals to give time to consider & address issues raised. 

I hope that helps (and thanks Cate McG for top tip re googling FSC Oz/NZ)

Thanks both for the reply, I think I need to re-think my whole plan from the start.

As we are also manufacturing, I will have to integrate this into my new plan.

Hopefully I can come up with something in 2 weeks as I have to send my replies from the audit :silly: .

I took your first post to think you were only a distributor of packaged goods, but now I'm seeing you state manufacturing is part of your business.  I'd pile on to suggest you could to include warehouse personnel in knowledge of the KPI's and other issues you run into in production.  The rah rah feel-good aspect of this is to let the warehouse personnel know that what they are doing supports production in meeting the company's goals.  We often overlook storage in lieu of the risks associated with actual production, but they truly are fundamental in many of our risk assessments pertaining to food safety overall.  We need to trust that when we pull raw materials or place finished goods in storage that the process in those rooms is locked in and running smoothly to prevent future problems.

hi all, 

thank you again for all your inputs on this.

so I've created a survey for employees using the one from the Aus/NZ food safety questionnaire. It was anonymous but I should have asked for their department so have more data to show (that'll be for a next time & I can put that on my assessment!)

this was quite informative, more than expected and I managed to identify some gaps that I can work on.

I will present a new plan of action and hopefully my CAR will be accepted!

Good to hear, good luck with it!