Food Bites Blog

We have indeed been spoilt! In fact, the biggest gift came in the form of an e-mail just yesterday – CQI and IRCA review and approval of our FSSC 22000 Version 6 Lead Auditor Course. This is wonderful news for us and anyone else who is interested in embarking on the journey of becoming a professional food safety auditor.

We have decided to dedicate all our blogs for the month of March (our birthday month) to all aspects relating to what we do for a living: changing people’s insights on food safety and other management systems through our training programmes.

There is an exciting bustle amongst our team this month; and for a darn good reason at that! We are celebrating 16 wonderful years of changing lives through our training programmes.

This week we ask a very interesting question; “How is it possible to look, but not see?”.
We find that this is happening more and more in food processing facilities – staff miss defects during sorting fruit or trimming fish, labels and/or expiry dates are checked and are still wrong and where specific customer instructions are missed.

Most GFSI recognized food safety standards such as FSSC, BRCGS and IFS have a very unique set of rules in terms of how audit non-conformances are dealt with.

This week we have decided to review the Food Safety Culture requirements as defined by the various GFSI standards. BRCGS was the first standard owner to introduce the concept of a food safety and quality culture and recent updates to the GFSI requirements have triggered other standard owners to align.

The past few weeks have shown us, once again, how important team work really is. Whether it’s standing in for an ill colleague or working diligently to solve a problem, we all feel better when we know we are part of something bigger.

With the first month of the year almost done and dusted, we thought now would be a great time to share some helpful advice on food safety audits – how can you turn them into a painless, pleasant learning process?