Hi,
So I was looking back at our Dec. 2017 SQF audit. At the time I had only been an SQFP for 4 months, and was working with an audit plan from our CB that had been completed prior to my employment at this facility.
We had a pretty harsh audit, and I was trying to figure out why our NC's had jumped from 3-4 per audit, to 12 in 2017.
I had a look at the audit plan, and noticed that our facility was listed as HIGH risk, and wondered if that could have been a small factor in this spike of NC's.
(I tackled the issues with several of the others, which were legitimate but I do feel that some were a little much. Regardless, we dealt with them).
We produce mushrooms here. We do not mix our own compost (we get it from an approved supplier), and we do not slice mushrooms at this facility.
I know of no other mushroom producer in our region who is listed as a high risk facility, so I believe that the SQFP before me had mis-categorized us as high risk.
We do fall under category 3, 4 & 14 but we aren't RTE, so I don't see how we could have been categorized as high risk.
Can I simply contact our CB to have this changed? Or do I need to provide any sort of documentation for this?
P.s: Can the auditor add a module to your FSC after the plan has already been confirmed? I read an email from our CB that specified that "The scope of the certification will be defined by the certification body and the supplier prior to the start of the certification audit. Once the certification audit has begun, the scope of the certification shall not be altered.".... Yet we got an NC for not having a module covered, and it was never in the plan, so I had nothing prepared for it.
I apologize for the novel, I'm still a semi-newbie. I've been in the food industry for 7 months. At the time of the audit I was nowhere near confident enough to challenge anything, although I did bring up the fact that the module wasn't listed in the scope of our audit.