Hello all,
I just thought I'd pop on here for a little intro. Like many of you, I found this forum during an extensive head-scratching moment of looking for answers. I've been a lurker for a couple months but finally realized I'd benefit more from being an active member.
A little about myself - I will start off with the fact that I have NO food safety experience. Long story short, I have almost a decade of working for military contracting companies who specialize in documentation/logistics. We would build, update, and maintain military technical manuals. We base all our manuals off of a "MIL-STD" which was used like our bible. All the instructions we needed to create/update manuals, from paragraph referencing and document versions, are right in that 800+ page document.. which changes every year and we are expected to memorize (haha). Sound familiar? Yep, just like our beloved GMPs and FDA Food Code - regulations are constantly changing. We also were just teetering on ISO 9000.... but alas, once our last contract ended, so did all of our employment. Office closed, nice seeing ya.
Being that was a pretty specialized niche of work, I got to a point where I just needed employment and to stop being picky. I took a job as a general laborer for my current company, a small (I mean really small, 15 employees including myself) warehouse that specializes in distributing gourmet wild foraged foods. Mushrooms, greens, that sort of thing. I worked on the floor for almost a year, when things started changing. The owner of the company started discussing more food safety, HACCP, audits, Primus, good manufacturing practices, everything that had me basically saying "huh??". Well surprise, you better learn it! I guess my previous technical writer experience sort of put me in the running for a position I didn't know I was applying for lol. No complaints though, hey this is something I'm familiar with, SOPs? I know those.. oh look regulations on how to build food safety manuals? That's sort of familiar to tech manuals... I got this!
I got a fancy new title as QA officer and put in charge of learning, updating, creating, and changing the company's very old SSOP documents on the path to becoming HACCP certified. It's been a steady 3 months of learning mass amounts of information as efficiently as possible to get our warehouse reformed and in tip top shape for an upcoming PrimusGFS audit. Woo! I can say I've honestly never been so lost in my life.. I feel I've came a long way, but I have so much more to go and so many questions with no one to ask...
So, here I am :) nice to meet you.