BRC Personal Experience

I have the BRC Packager Standard, much the same as the Packaging Standard, but there are parts of it that really annoy me. A classic is to have a system for the monitoring the issuing of plasters. Such prescriptive clauses remove the need for solid risk assessment and training, and focus auditiors on form filling rather than establishing the order in a company.

I used to have the RSPH hygiene standard, which was a much better one in that it had sensible requirements, but the overriding one was that all of your procedures had to be generated from HACCP, so, if say in the example above, our operators were trained and we had detection methods of plasters, then we would not need a mandatory system for plasters.

Cheers, Mike.

Hi Mike,

I know what you mean!

The poorer customer auditors used to try and push us down the record everything route, it's not easy but sometimes you just have to resist on certain things.

Blindly implementing unnecessary, idiosyncratic procedures switches operators off and then you don't get the commitment on the important things.

Thankfully in the BRC/IoP Packaging Standard your are only required to have blue, metal-detectable plasters, which is fair enough.

Regards,
Simon