Identifying Quality & safety problems

Hi every one,

I have a special case in a fruits & vegetables distributor environment and I really don't know where to start.

As a HACCP Coordinator, my boss told me to let him know if "anything" related to food safety or food quality can be corrected/improved.
I wanna know where to start

We are already HACCP certified and comply with requirements. Now, we want to improve quality and reduce costs.

In our flow chart, We receive, store, ripe (when needed) , re-pack (when needed) & ship produce.

When I ask my boss what are the problems he faces to prioritize my efforts, he ask me back the question and tell me i am the MAN

What are he problems in this businness ? I'm in for just 7 months and find everything crazy fast: Traders buy produce and sell them to food service companies. It can happen they sell over ripe produce. The produce come back (6% of sales) BUT we still sale them cheaper to another customer who is willing to buy over ripe produce. There is a market for all kind of quality in this businness. The only problem is: they sell over ripe produce cheaper.

Please help

Where would you start ?

As a HACCP Coordinator, my boss told me to let him know if "anything" related to food safety or food quality can be corrected/improved.
I wanna know where to start

Hi Dugaucher.

HACCP coordinator ? Are you sure you have enough authority to improve your business performances ?

Let's suppose you have. It depends on your company's policy.
Do you, as a company, know who you are, where you come from and where you're going ?
If the answer is yes, well that's all you need .
If the answer is no, those are the first things you have to write down on a piece of paper and let all the people know and start building up the system from that point.
Sounds quite easy, isn't it ?

Regards. Franco

You should listen to Franco he's a wise man.

However, I'm going to tackle this from a different angle so that you can get some pretty instant results under your own steam.

If only all the produce you supplied were perfect and not over-ripe - then you could sell it all for top price. A root cause analysis of this problem and an effective solution would be a good starting point and I'm sure would make your boss very happy. One thing why do you send customers over-ripe produce when you know it will come back?

Maybe over ripe produce isn't the biggest concern to your customers - have you ever asked them? You could carry out some sort of survey to check what they are most and least satisfied with about your products and service - that way you could identify the things that need to improve that matter most to customers.

Or maybe you could find out which errors and problems are costing you the most money (internal rejections and customer complaints) - improve these and again your boss will be happy.

Food for thought.

Regards,

Thanks, guys

The problem is, buyers buy produce at a certain price and wanna make profit no matter what. if we have no order, produce stay in coolers and start decaying. But as this is subjective (visual inspection), thay still try to sell it at the same price to customer. If customer say "no", they reduce the price but ask the customer to keep it anyway. But again, 6% of total sales are returned, which means, customer don't even wanna keep it sometimes. So we sell to other customers cheaper.

Sometimes, customers, order same produce from different places to get the best deal. when we ship to them, they say"I don't want it". You ask "why" and the say "Quality". Does the produce really have quality problem ??? It's a customer so you just take it back. Do you have info about root cause analysis ?

There are lots of methodologies and tools to help you identify the root cause of a problem. Probably the simplest method is the ‘5 whys'. Take any problem and ask the question why? 5 times, unpeeling the layers of the onion can help you understand the root cause of the problem. Of course it doesn't always work; in fact sometimes it just makes you weep.

1. Why are we getting such a high rate of returns?
Because the customer says the produce is overripe.

2. Why is the produce overripe?
We store it too long.

3. Why do we store it too long?
We find it difficult to predict customer order requirements.

4. Why do we find it difficult to predict customer order requirements?
They don't provide us with a clear schedule.

5. Why don't they provide a clear schedule?
We haven't asked.

I'm sure this isn't the case, but give it a try with your problem. We can talk about other methods if this doesn't work for you.

Regards,
Simon