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Food safety culture documentation

Started by , May 01 2024 06:10 PM
9 Replies

Hello,

 

Does anyone have any starting point forms, documents or procedure for food safety culture. I will greatly appreciate it. 

 

Thank you, 

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I would suggest doing a search for Food Safety Culture, as I remember several threads over the years.

I did but I am not having any luck. 

Just search Culture in the box under LINKS and STORE on the upper right.

 

I got 4 threads.

Are people getting busted on this still for SQF audits?  I have never been asked to see how we are accessing Food Safety Culture, never asked to see data or analytics in the 3 years or so since it's been added to the code.  IMO you assess a site's FS culture based on what you see as you do the plant inspection and from your interaction and questions with the staff.  I do have documentation and such in case it ever comes up and we do discuss and document it during management review, but I have never been asked to produce documents or records on this during and SQF audit.  Could it be cause we are Food Packaging, though I don't think that should matter?

I don't know how to link other threads, but I did find a few surveys on other threads that I modified for our company.  It was super helpful.  Our first food safety culture meeting is next week.

 

There are a few webinars on the topic, the FDA/Stop Foodborne Illness has a series of webinars on it that I found very helpful.  I have a couple webinars from this site that I found and started watching one yesterday, but got interrupted before I got too far.  I'm looking for things to talk about during the first few meetings.  I'm not a manager or in leadership, so I'm trying to get others involved as everything I find mentions management commitment as their first point.

I think I was asked the second year this had been introduced...that's it.

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I usually tell people to review the following doc.

 

https://mygfsi.com/w...ulture-Full.pdf

 

As a starting place, I usually use what i call my big 3.   

 

Messaging - how will senior managment provide a consistant and clear message of the imortance of food safety.  

Capability - how will you ensure that all employees have the knowlege / experieince to ensure aall employees are capable of proper actions and desiciions regaurding food safety

Empowerment / engaugement - how will you ensure employees are enguaged positive food safety 

 

Administer your food safety survey and adjust as needed.   You could adminster  the survey fisrt to understand where you may be week to begin with then reevaluate.  

Are people getting busted on this still for SQF audits?  I have never been asked to see how we are accessing Food Safety Culture, never asked to see data or analytics in the 3 years or so since it's been added to the code.  IMO you assess a site's FS culture based on what you see as you do the plant inspection and from your interaction and questions with the staff.  I do have documentation and such in case it ever comes up and we do discuss and document it during management review, but I have never been asked to produce documents or records on this during and SQF audit.  Could it be cause we are Food Packaging, though I don't think that should matter?

 

The plants within our company have been pressed on it for each audit I've witnessed over my past 2.5 years working here, but we've been compliant.  My job is to provide a monthly meeting template for the plants where I run data/trending on our complaints, EMP monitoring, sanitation monitoring, hold and fm data, food safety objective review, etc.  We include relevant FDA/USDA updates, review of national recalls each month, etc.  Each plant has their management teams sign in and sit to review and discuss the reports each month, and they take notes of what they'll go and discuss with their teams based on these reports.  Between showing our SQF auditor the meeting reports, and keeping track of the notes they take away from the meeting (including doing CAPAs when a trend move to unacceptable ranges), the auditors are pleased and mark us compliant.

 

Couple of my plants are going an extra step to perform a "Food Safety Culture Walk" on a checklist they developed.  Taking the senior plant manager and a small management group to walk the building, discuss observations, and interview employees.  I don't find much value in it, I don't think it measures things very efficiently, but auditors have expressed pleasure in seeing a cooperative management walk whereas so many times departments just want to argue with each other.

I would suggest doing a search for Food Safety Culture, as I remember several threads over the years.

 

I usually document what are stated in our FSC program or plan e.g photo of awarding an employee, posters or signage, training cert of my team etc.


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