Why set food safety objectives?
Food safety objectives help you to achieve the following goals:
1. Reduce the risk of sickness and injury from food.
2. Improve food quality by ensuring that all ingredients are safe, nutritious, and not harmful to the environment or human health.
3. Minimize waste by reducing or eliminating spoilage and discarding dietary toxins.
When it comes to safeguarding public health, setting food safety objectives is one of the most important decisions a business can make. It’s also one of the simplest—and least risky —actions you can take for your food safety since it doesn’t require costly new technologies or ongoing training.”
What are the benefits of setting food safety objectives?
Food safety objectives can be divided into risk mitigation, food quality improvement, and food safety goals. These benefits are important and should be considered when setting or tracking food safety objectives.
1: Risk Mitigation – By specifying specific goals beyond compliance with laws and regulations, you can reduce the chances of experiencing a serious incident. This includes reducing cross-contamination between different parts of the production process or implementing best practices for storing foods to minimize moisture exposure.
2: Food Quality Improvement –Improving the quality of your products means they’ll taste better and meet your customer’s expectations more consistently. Setting objective parameters related to flavour profiles, nutritional content, colour, appearance etc., will help you achieve this goal systematically across all product lines.
3: Food Safety Goals – Once you have improved the quality and consistency of your products, it’s time to focus on preventing incidents from happening in the first place by establishing safe operating procedures (SOPs) for everyone involved in your food production processes understands. These SOPs can be built as guidelines for monitoring conditions such as temperature levels, flavour, composition, pathogen levels etc.
4. Meet food safety audit requirements -Are you working with SQF audit, HACCP audit, BRC audit, FSSC 22000 audit, ISO 22000 audit, or other GFSI audits? Food safety objectives are one of the elements we are looking for to ensure we can reap the above benefits.
By taking these factors into account when setting objectives or tracking progress over time, you can ensure that your food safety program remains effective year after year.
How to set food safety objectives?
Food safety objectives are important for any business that processes, stores, or sells food. They can be challenging as you set them for years -you might run out of ideas of what to set. This article is a quick guide to help you determine what to expect when setting food safety objectives.
All food safety objectives have these common characteristics. They should be specific and measurable so you can track the progress of your efforts. Food safety objectives should be realistic, so you don’t set yourself up for failure by expecting too much from your team in the early stages of implementation.
The food safety objectives should be relevant to the business and its customers so you can make sure all stakeholders understand what needs to be done to maintain a safe facility.
Setting food safety objectives can be difficult, especially if you are unfamiliar with the terminology and concepts involved. You can start by dividing food safety objectives into prevention, control, mitigation and compensation.
Prevention objectives focus on preventing contamination from occurring in the first place; control objectives cover methods to reduce or eliminate any potential contamination that may have happened.
Some factors to consider when setting food safety objectives include:
-The type and severity of foodborne illness outbreaks that have occurred in your area
-The number and types of recalls that have been issued by your company or the government
-How many complaints about foodborne illness have been received from customers
-The cost of foodborne illness outbreaks and recalls
-How much time does it take to remove a food safety hazard from the supply chain
When setting objectives, it is important to consider the food safety process. Objectives should encompass all areas of responsibility, including prevention through effective sanitation and hygiene practices; detection through proper inspection; response with corrective action when necessary; communication with customers and employees about safe handling practices.
Once you know what needs to be done to meet your objectives, setting a timeline can help keep everything on track. And remember: Food safety isn’t about taking risks; it’s about ensuring that your customers are safe too.
Example of Food Safety Objectives
Common food safety objective set by food company includes
- Reduce waste by 10% annually
- Reduce response time for customer complaints from 2 days to 1 day
- Reduce customer complaints by 20% annually
- Increase production capacity by 10%
- Reduce GMP issues (name GMP issues) by 10%
- Conduct GMP training weekly
- Decrease employee turnover by 10%
- Achieve x % in our SQF audit
- Achieve x % in our HACCP audit
- Achieve x % in our FSSC 22000 audit
There are many more food safety objectives that you can set that align with your company goals, relevant to food safety, customer and organizational’s vision and mission.
How to track food safety objectives?
Once you have established your food safety objectives, it is important to track their progress regularly using reliable metrics. Many different metrics could potentially measure the success of your food safety programs, such as sanitation metrics, number of incidents, customer complaints, and process improvement parameters such as waste reduction, quality, production quantity per line, cost reduction, etc.
The most effective way to track the progress on the desired objectives is to be concerned about two primary questions:
- How do the objectives translate to our operations?
- What parameters can we use to indicate that the solutions are effective?
The Role of Data and Trends
Food safety is a top priority for businesses of all sizes. However, it can be difficult to determine which food safety objectives are most effective. This is where trending and historical data comes in handy. You can ensure that your business makes the best decisions for its customers by tracking the effectiveness of different food safety objectives.
Food businesses can use an excel spreadsheet to track compliance and non-compliance, generating simple bar charts or graphs. This is useful for seeing patterns over weeks or months. More advanced tracking techniques could include finding correlations between measured parameters or analyzing the data based on changes implemented in food safety programs.
Sharing Food Safety Objective Result
Once you have successfully achieved your food safety objectives, sharing the success with your team and stakeholders is important. Food professionals can do this in various ways, such as holding monthly or quarterly meetings to update everyone on the progress made and discuss any challenges that may have arisen. You could also create an annual report highlighting key achievements and improvement areas.
If there are areas where non-compliance occurs more frequently than expected, corrective action may be taken, such as increased inspections or better education programs for employees.
By sharing information openly, you help ensure that everyone involved in food safety understands what needs to be done and helps keep expectations realistic. This helps to prevent frustration and ensure that everyone can work together harmoniously.
Conclusion:
By setting and tracking your food safety objectives, you can ensure that your workplace operates at its best.
To ensure that your food is safe to eat, it’s important to set and track food safety objectives. This way, you’ll know what needs to be done to maintain a clean facility and prevent potential health risks. While this process may seem complex at first, it can be easier with the help of a good food safety consultant.
Working with SFPM Consultant for your Food Safety Objectives
Food safety is one of the most important aspects of any business and for us at SFPM Consulting. Ensuring your food is safe to eat is essential to keeping customers happy and ensuring a healthy bottom line. Our SFPM Consultant can help you set realistic food safety objectives, guide how to achieve them, and track your progress so that you stay on track.
We also advise improving your food handling procedures and helping you identify potential risks and vulnerabilities in your supply chain from Day 1. By working with our SFPM consultant, you’ll be able to ensure that your food safety programs are continuously reviewed for improvement.
Feel free to download our food safety objective tracking sheets and book a meeting to get the help you need today.
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