The FDA’s New Era in Food Safety Initiative has brought sharp attention to the fact that food safety systems and processes should be an integral part of how companies do business. Today’s reality shows a siloed set of food safety processes that enable companies to “be in compliance.” The “pass to ship” mentality drives a company towards leaving the responsibility solely on the food safety team. Rather, it should be a joint responsibility with the business process teams. A true food safety culture can only take hold if business process teams integrate food safety into their ongoing workflow with real time leading indicators of food safety.
The current state of food safety industry has evolved due to primarily regulatory requirements passed at various times in history. The industry has adapted their own standards to meet these regulatory requirements within their product verticals and global locations.
With the rollout of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and the previous industry standards, including the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), the evolution is based on discrete and prescriptive programs to meet these requirements. The best interpretation has been to maintain a core and standalone system with crosscheck level verification to established business requirements.
Based on this evolution, the food safety systems target meeting these laws and standards with static systems under control of limited organizational resources as the various titled and designated qualified individuals. This model has led to the responsibility of food safety to reside within a group of core leads that oversee the complete organization from shop floor to C-suite.
Silos
As we address the expansion to achieve a food safe culture across the industry, a barrier of accountability has developed with inadequate alignment of organization and programs within “silos”.
The challenges of today are how to maintain the established programs and establish complete integration of food safety responsibility and management at all levels of each and every food organization.
The current situation represents a barrier to the full alignment, accountability and effective management of food safety. All food organizations must take full responsibility that they are in the “safe food business.” There is no room for failure and outbreaks. Injury and death are still all too frequent.
A Global Food Safety Culture
The FDA presents the “New Era of Food Safety” with an estimated 10-year period of accomplishing these plans. The necessary changes must be developed and implemented now to move past Food Safety Silos to a Global Food Safety Culture.
What can facilitate this across organizations, industry segments, and the globe by instilling food safety and culture within the business systems at all points? Food Safety is a key business function of the complete organization. A prerequisite to being in the food business must be to implement this broader-based approach as part of the business.
This approach, as is used in virtually all business systems for operations and revenue, is available with fully integrated systems where a dollar cannot be spent without fully meeting the business system. The fully integrated system provides the means from the C-suite to the Shopfloor and everywhere within the food business chain to participate and contribute to food safety as integral parts of the overall food safe business system. Please contact Adroit North America for more information on this business transformation!
The steps are as follows:
- Assess the current situation
- Develop objectives to integrate food safety within business systems
- Change the organizational model to achieve a food safety culture
- Review all business systems for the integration of food safety from existing segregated compliance systems
- Determine the necessary changes with business team deployment of food safety
- Plan the objectives and implementation to achieve a fully integrated safe food business system