The importance of food safety cannot be overstated in the current business climate. Every year there are roughly 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths that are attributable to foodborne diseases.
The majority of these originate from bacteria, viruses, and pathogens that are consumed and then wreak their havoc on the body. Although a lot of factors contribute to the spread of foodborne illnesses, they can largely be traced to restaurants, food manufacturers and suppliers.
It’s up to these industry players to invest in quality incident tracking that will lower risk and keep customers safe and healthy. And that raises the question: Are you capturing and tracking all your non-conforming food products?
If your answer is “I don’t know,” that’s a pretty clear sign that something needs to change - and quickly. And if your answer is “yes” then how are you tracking these issues?
Every business and industry has its own definition of what constitutes a non-conforming food product. In the food industry, it typically refers to one or more of the following:
It’s not usually difficult to recognize a non-conforming food product, but it’s not as easy to identify where and when a product might have transitioned from conforming to non-conforming. This contributes to poor capture rates for non-conforming products, which in turn feeds the blame game further down the supply chain.
Non-conforming ingredients can be passed along from a supplier, created in an assembly line, or occur as a result of being stored under improper conditions.
The crucial point for both restaurants and food suppliers is to have a system in place for monitoring and handling non-conforming foods when they do appear. “By definition, nonconforming products result from verification, inspection or test activities. If these don’t exist at a particular stage of product realization, then nonconforming products don’t exist either,” explains Craig Cochran, project manager with the Center for International Standards & Quality.
“Organizations shouldn’t abuse this by claiming they’re not performing verification when they really are. Formal verification activities are very easily recognized by auditors. More important, an organization is playing the business version of Russian roulette when it tries to circumvent nonconforming product procedures for the sake of convenience.”
So what are some of the specific ways that businesses can properly handle non-conforming food products in order to keep their customers safe, avoid damaging their brand, and stay out of legal trouble? Here are some suggestions:
“Documents need to be kept concerning the quarantine of the non-conforming product, equipment used in making the product,” says Frank Gublo of Michigan State University Extension. “Records also need to be kept regarding the disposition of the product. This is necessary to mitigate risk and demonstrate that the processor has adequate measures in place to deal with manufacturing problems.”
How can you be sure you’re capturing all of your non-conforming food products? If you aren’t investing in non-conforming incident tracking, then you probably aren’t.
Achieving maximum visibility for the various quality issues you’re experiencing in your supply chain isn’t easy. It takes time, money, and a consistent commitment to staying on top of your supply chain.
If you try to do this manually, you’re likely to give up. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to tackle a mission of this complexity without the help of powerful incident-management technology.
That’s why you need FoodLogiQ Connect, our proprietary platform that streamlines incident management and makes it easier to capture non-conforming food products earlier and more often. Here are some of the features: