Organizing for Product Safety and Quality Management Success

This blog post has been moved to the author's eBook.

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection. 

Unannounced Audits and the Issue of Distrust

This blog post has been moved to the author's eBook.

Posted By Felix Amiri

____________________________________

Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection. 

An Actual Recall and the Most Likely Reaction of Other Parties

This poll was posted to the GCSE-Food & Health Protection Group on LinkedIn in 2012. 

Poll Question: 
If your company goes through an actual recall, what is the most likely situation that you expect it to face, A, B or C? 

Situation A: 

- If certified to a food safety program, the certifying body yanks its certificate from your company and waits for things to be fixed. They insist on another full audit with your company bearing the full cost, etc.; 

- Customers pounce on you to claim damages; 
- Government (public protection) agencies find the opportunity to levy fines on your company and lay criminal charges; 
- Competitors take it as the opportunity for negative advertisement against your company 

Situation B: 

- If certified to a food safety program, the certifying body stands by you to help you get through the situation and contributes in ways that minimize operation re-assessment costs; 
- Customers and consumers take an active part in helping to resolve the root cause of the recall and voluntarily help to fund the solution; 
- Government (public protection) agencies provide funds (loans) that you will pay back without interest to help you protect the consuming public likely affected by the recall; 
- Competitors realize that they are also affected and embark on advertisement to restore consumer confidence in the industry as a whole. 

Situation C: 
- Nobody cares; 
- Consumers, customers, certification bodies, government agencies, competitors, et cetera simply leave you alone and do not hold you accountable.

Which of these situations, A, B or C do you think is most likely to occur?

Posted By Felix Amiri

____________________________________

Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection. 

Aftermath of the Killer Cantaloupe Devastation:

This blog post has been moved to the author's eBook.

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection. 

The “Doing Just Fine, Thank You” Operator:

If you are doing just fine, let the reality prove it and let a knowledgeable assessor determine that fact. 

You may be perfectly happy with what you are doing right now but have you checked to see if you can do better? 

             You should not be like this guy >>>>

Satisfaction with "how things have always been done" is seldom an enlightened stance. It is often the stance of those who have yielded to perpetual incompetence.

An operation may appear to be running fine on the surface and the owner/manager may choose to argue that "the operation is running fine, thank you”. This person may ignore the signs of possible failure, especially where such signs are not addressed by the generic audit scheme used for assessing the effectiveness and reliability of implemented programs and control measures. Where certificates of "compliance" are issued to augment the bragging rights of the "Doing Just Fine " operator, the signs of failure may even become further obscured by the ensuing celebrations.

This is what the "just comply and be certified" economy does to the human mind. If, by simply following a set of rules, a certificate is earned that gives the compliance-focused operator bragging rights, the operator is lulled into resting satisfied. He or she no longer feels the need to solve real problems that require "too much thinking". Compliance-focused systems lead compliance-focused operators to neglect their responsibility to think.

Until an operation actually suffers a cataclysmic failure, obvious signs may be blatantly ignored but not during or after such failures. The “Doing Just Fine " operator who refuses to learn from reasonable predictions often learns the hard way that mere compliance may, in fact, be dangerous.

For Additional Reading:

1. Product Safety - Beyond Compliance

2. Breaking the Addiction to Superficiality

3. Systemic Fraud – closer than it appears in the mirror

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection. 

Recall-Free versus Recall-Prone – A Tale of Three Companies

This blog post has been moved to the author's eBook.

Posted By Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection. 

Product Safety - Reality, Redundancy and Money-Drain Check

The affordability of a food safety and quality management system is a significant concern for many operations. The solution is the elimination of resource drains without compromising food safety.

As it is with running a successful food business, running a successful food safety and quality assurance program requires the courage to say “NO” to all redundant suggestions and impositions. These are resource drains. Every food safety and quality manager, coordinator or custodian needs to know where the drains and gains are.

Do you know what matters in your operation and where your drains and drain plugs are? Which of these proposed requirements does your operation absolutely need and which can you do without and still maintain a recall-free existence? From your experience and assessment of the success that you have achieved with any thing on the list, you may indicate one or more of these that you consider to be redundant or "resource drain":

A.    Management commitment

B.    Employee commitment

C.    Proper training

D.    SSQA (Safety, Security & Quality Assurance)

E.    Third party certification audits

F.    Consulting Services

G.    Effective internal audits

H.    All

I.      None

Do you know of any beneficial requirements that could be added to the list?

The following posts may also be of interest:

1. Food Safety Resource Utilization and Success
2. Recent Recall Notices:

3. Well Organized Recalls – A Sadly Necessary Pre-occupation
4. Out from the Trenches of Product Recalls - Professional Casualties and Crusaders

5. Recall – Case Studies
6. The Cherry Processor

Posted By Felix Amiri

____________________________________

Felix Amiri is the current Food Industry Chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection. 

Traceability beyond Recalls

This blog post has been moved to the author's eBook.

Posted by Felix Amiri

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Felix Amiri is currently the chair of GCSE-Food & Health Protection, and a sworn SSQA advocate.