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How working with food safety consultant benefits you in 2024?

Felicia L
How working with Food Safety Consultant benefits you in 2022 by SFPM Consulting

SFPM Consulting present Weighing the food safety certifications option blog

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Table of contents

 

Introduction

Have you thought of why you need a food safety consultant, other than meeting CFIA PCP requirements, SFCR PCP requirements, or HACCP or SQF certifications that are due in the upcoming weeks or overdue like yesterday?

Yes, as a food safety consultant myself, I know what is needed to help you and your food company pass the inspections and audits within a few days or weeks, depending on the scope of the project.  While we are often tasked to assist our clients with urgent or immediate food safety projects, our core consulting services at SFPM Consulting go beyond just meeting or passing audits and inspections.

 

I have food safety. Why do I need SFPM Consulting?

It is a fact that we work with so many food companies that thinks they have a food safety program in place yet, struggle the compliance with local regulatory requirements or if they are HACCP certified, getting ready for the audit. It makes you wonder why?

The role of Food Safety Manager is a profession that requires highly trained individuals and specific personal and technical skills. It is not something that you can graduate with a BSc. or MSc. in Food Science and you know what and how to do them?

Here are some of the challenges that we see in our food industry:

In addition, not everyone is interested to work in managing records and processes. Qualified food safety managers must have the interest to work with documentation and records, know how to identify and mitigate food safety risks and be knowledgeable/ experienced working in a team setting.

Now, how do you know if your food safety programs work? Here are a few ways that we use, when performing a gap assessment at our client’s facility. Tips: Do it unannounced!  You will be surprised sometimes, even your food safety personnel may get it wrong!

Remember, if there is no record, nothing happened.

The question to you, how did your food facility do? Are these finding consistent with what has been reported to you? What’s the missing link?

 

Our Food Consulting Principles

Your success is our success.

Our core principles are simple.

DEVELOP–> TRAIN –> IMPLEMENT–> IMPROVE

  1. DEVELOP: Every food manufacturers needs to have a properly developed programs to operate.
  2. TRAIN: When you have a properly developed program, you need to train and ensure your staff knows about the program.
  3. IMPLEMENT:  A food safety program is useless if it is kept on the computer or shelves. They need to be functional.  We teach the tips and tricks to implement food safety management systems.
  4. IMPROVE: If someone promises you that they can improve your process without a stable food safety management system, that’s a lie. A properly implemented FSMS is the key for us, to start assisting you to fully gain the benefit of FSMS without disturbing the food safety processes

We provide two main types of consultation services to support our core principles and your needs:

  1. Project-based: Immediate requirements for compliance
  2. Continuous support: Through our monthly support program, we continue to provide training, and implementation strategies to build the local’s team ability to manage the day-to-day operations & steer away from last-minute compliance issues and be audit-ready. This long term relationship allows us to work with the local team to build in food safety culture and process optimization, best suited to the team

In addition, we understand access to consulting services can be limited due to budget, we have prepared food safety templates that are easily followed and updated to speed up the compliance process so that smaller businesses gain access to food safety resources that they need.

 

SFPM Food Consultant Role

The Key Role of SFPM Food Consultant

The Benefit

We like to always tell our clients that while these are the main benefit for working with us, you should always look at the hidden benefits

  1. Expedite project
  2. Gain consultant’s expertise
  3. Extended resources to help relieve your internal team’s HR issues

The Hidden Benefits

The benefit of using an SFPM Food Safety Consultant doesn’t stop at the surface level. We are known for our insights into the future and creativity, blended with our client’s projects. After all, our client success is our success. Here are a few examples of how we go above and beyond.

Equipment Purchase, Installment and Building Construction

We help with reviewing equipment and building structures to ensure money save for construction does not impact the long-term spending for building maintenance and cleaning and sanitation requirements.

I like you to consider the risk of purchasing the wrong equipment. We work with a multimillion facility that was happy purchasing cheap equipment from abroad, without QA approval/review. Well, the problem is the equipment does not meet the requirements for cleaning and sanitation. Observations include unsmooth food contact surfaces, hard to reach areas.

Result: Excessive accumulation of food residues takes more time, resources and chemicals to clean. All equivalent to money down the drain, for a prolonged period. And there is nothing we can do, to correct this. Living with this, for the moment.

Tips: Saving from buying cheaper equipment, maybe your cost in the long run.

Business Strategy -Social Media Strategy and Introduction to Our Community Partner

We trust that building your food brand takes partnership and collaboration. We advise our clients on social media strategy, introduce community partners, strategies to expand product lines etc, whenever we get a chance.

In fact, one of the clients is about to stop producing because their manufacturer says they cannot cope with the operations requirements. They have one month to find ways to maintain their supply chain, we recommended alternative solutions for them to continue to operate.

We are here to build a long-lasting relationship. We want to see our clients grow and expand.

 

Do’s and Don’t when Hiring a Food Safety Consultant

At SFPM Consulting, we prioritize your needs when working with you. Therefore, we are transparent when it comes to our processes and services. Choosing a food safety consultant to meet your needs is important.

Here are a few dos and don’t according to the Quality Assurance Magazine and our approach to these:

Do’s

  1. Understand the consultant’s credentials and process before hiring
  2. Provide a team to work with the consultant
  3. Arrange for training by the consultant

Dont’s

  1. Consultants should not write your programs
  2. Consultants should not guarantee a passing audit
  3. Consultants should not participate in the audit to assist with the audit’s question.
While we agree with most of these, we do write food safety programs for our clients. We find challenges when we don’t write programs for our clients, they may not have the expertise to do so.
There are specific conditions that allow us to write food safety programs on behalf of our clients. For example, our clients provide the current procedures and must approve the procedures before use and implementation.
Regardless, we offer support programs options for our clients, to continually obtain support for implementation.
Implementation is the key to all food safety programs’ success. A food safety consultant can write the best food safety program in the world but it is worthless if the local food safety team does not know or fails to implement the food safety management system.
When it comes to audit and inspection, we get how nervous and nerve-racking it can be, when you need to answer the question right. Thus, we opt to provide audit support for our clients who need it.
We understand that our clients are experts in their processes and works. Our presence is there to observe and be the moral support to our clients, as well as, to ensure we understand the deviation scope so we can better guide our clients to correct and prevent the deviations.

Working with SFPM -as a small business

Smaller business, we get you! Resources are tight but that doesn’t mean that you need to short cut food safety programs.

Many smaller food businesses come to us, as project-based clients. We are capable to assist you from small food safety procedures to the implementation of the full food safety management systems.

When you are working with us, we are really building a long-term relationship with you. When you are ready to scale up, we are there for you.

That being said, the common feedback that we get is:

​We know we are in compliant with food safety procedures, our program is
fine without a food safety consultant. We do this for obtaining more
sales.​

Sales are very important, don’t get us wrong but wouldn’t you think that your branding is important. Let me ask you this if your brand is known for recall or findings of foreign materials OR you are involved in a food recall, what does that mean to you, cost and problem wise?

I hope you realize that’s the 1000+++ times of your investment for food safety programs. The fact is no one can sell unsafe foods -that’s a prerequisite of being in the food business and having a food business license. Food safety is a barrier to entry for the food business. If you choose to have a food business, you need to ensure that the food is safe and it meets applicable regulatory requirements.

It is not enough to just think that you have a food safety program, just because you are approved by the local authority to operate. Any approval or certification doesn’t provide assurance for properly developed and implemented food safety programs. However, your actual program implementation would reflect that.

There are a few ways we can work with you based on your budget and requirements.

The only reason why we offer the cheapest options is to remove the barrier to access to food safety procedures and allow you to focus on implementing the procedures.  Our food safety templates are extremely accessible and start from CAD 250.

Not sure which option works best for you, contact us through our Contact Us page or book a complimentary Strategy Call with us:

 

Working with SFPM -as a larger organization

There are many reasons why a larger organization like yours, would want to work with SFPM Consulting. Time crunch, levelling up a staff through training, delegate certain processes such as internal audit, etc.

Simply said, we help your employee refocus on your business and not the tedious day-to-day food safety management tasks

SFPM Benefits

We always work with budget and requirements.

Not sure which option works best for you, contact us through our Contact Us page or book a complimentary Strategy Call with us:

 

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