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Preventing foreign bodies from contaminating your food. File that under: Essential. Create an effective hazard audit with this easy-to-follow template.
Your food production site is unique. Ditto for the food you produce and the nuances of your business. Yet no matter what type of food manufacturer you are, you can follow the steps detailed below to minimise the risk of foreign bodies contaminating your products and threatening both your reputation and your bottom line.
Step 1: Risk assess your delivery and storage areas
The first few steps all relate to a thorough risk assessment of your production site. That begins with your delivery and food storage areas. Grab your detective gear and get forensic. No risk is too small or inconsequential. List all potential foreign body contamination hazards.
Step 2: Risk assess your production lines
The next area to risk assess is your production lines. Look out for hazards on, above or adjacent to the line. Potential risks include diffusers, mastic in the ceiling or wall panels, overhead leads, nuts, bolts and screws in equipment, plastic or glass dials and plastic covers. Take your time and go line by line. This is not a job you should rush.
Step 3: Consider the use of mobile items
In each area of your production site that you assess, consider the use and storage of mobile items such as knives, aprons and cooking utensils. They too pose a risk when it comes to foreign body contamination. A fork, for example, could fall into a vat with relative ease.
Step 4: Risk assess the perimeter of your site
Anywhere food is, insects and other creatures are not far behind. The www is thick with stories of insects and even small rodents making their way into consumer food. Check that the perimeter walls of your site are properly secure and consider areas where pest control measures may be necessary.
Step 5: Assess likelihood and severity of risks
By now you most likely have a decent-sized list of potential contamination hazards. That’s good. The next step is to give a score to each hazard on your list. To do this, first consider the likelihood of each risk happening. The higher the likelihood, the higher the score you should allocate - from 1 (low likelihood) to 5 (high likelihood), for example.
Then go back through your list and allocate a score for each item based on how severe the problem would be if it happened. For instance, some foreign bodies may present a choke hazard or contaminate a large amount of product. Others may be easy to detect post-production and affect only a small batch. Again, score items from 1 (not very serious) to 5 (very serious). Add these scores together to categorise the severity of the risk for each item on your list.
Step 6: Assign frequency of integrity checks
Once each of your risks has been scored, you can assign a frequency with which each risk should be checked. For example you might conduct integrity checks once monthly for items scored between one and two, weekly for items scored between three and five, daily for items scored between six and eight, and twice daily for items scored nine or ten.
Step 7: Implement standard operating procedures (SOPs)
The next step is to define - in writing - exactly how each integrity check should be performed, and what actions should be taken if an integrity check is failed. These guidelines are called standard operating procedures (SOPs) and there should be one for each of your integrity checks. (Incidentally, this is great for proving due diligence in the event of an investigation or audit in the future.) In reality, many of your checks will be identical for different areas of your site, meaning you could have one SOP for multiple integrity checks.
Step 8: Determine how integrity checks will be recorded and archived
Whether digital or physical, you need to keep records of your integrity checks: when they were executed, who performed them, whether they were passed or failed and details of any corrective action taken.
Step 9: Allocate responsibility for completing integrity checks
Your production speed is linked inseparably to your profits. While integrity checks are crucial, it’s also important that they are completed as speedily as possible. For this reason it’s a good idea to diffuse the responsibility for integrity checks across your workforce. Spread the load to make sure checks are performed quickly as well as thoroughly. Checks should be performed by the same members of staff, who should be trained thoroughly in the respective SOPs.
Step 10: Audit
Conduct regular (at least yearly) audits to make sure your integrity checks are being made and recorded accurately and in accordance with SOPs. Audits are particularly important when things change at your site. For instance you might procure new equipment, build a new area or change the locations of certain machinery.
What happens if an integrity check is failed?
Even with the most seemingly foolproof risk assessment and integrity checks in the industry, there’s still a chance that a contamination incident could occur. You simply can’t account for all of the possible risks. (That, by the way, is not an excuse to be anything less that rigorous in your risk assessments).
So what should you do with a failed integrity check?
Step 11: Take action
Your SOPs will detail how to respond to a failed integrity check. Action might include stopping the production line or identifying and quarantining contaminated products. Make sure there’s a written record of what happened as well as the corrective action taken.
Step 12: Complete root cause analysis
Once the incident has been remedied, it’s important to complete a root cause analysis. Trace back the steps that preceded the incident and ask what caused the problems that led to the failed check. Again, this forms part of your due diligence so file this document away safely. Depending on the outcome of your root cause analysis, you may wish to revise your SOP to prevent the same issue happening again in the future.
Over to you...
As a food manufacturer or producer, you have a responsibility to keep your customers safe. Besides, contamination scares hurt your reputation, delay production and can lead to costly product recalls. Doesn’t it make sense to mitigate the risks of foreign body contamination? Follow the twelve steps above and you can do exactly that.
