Customer Complaints. SQF 2.1.5

We are a frozen vegetable packaging Plant.  During the SQF Audit we got a NCR or Minor. Could anybody share their Program on how is done?

 

We are trying to close the Minor.

 

The Plant do not receive customer complaints. Just the corporate office and the Plant just responds to the VP of QA requests.

 

Any guidance will be greatly appreciated.

You will need a way to track the complaints from corporate. Each time corporate sends you a complaint, log it into an Excel sheet and fill out a "complaint form." From there you will need to figure out the cause of the issue, what you are doing to fix it, and what you are doing to prevent it from happening again. Create an SOP that goes through the process from corporate receiving the complaint to your plant determining a preventative measure and closing the complaint on the spreadsheet.

We had the same issue that we didn't record ours on site when corporate is the one who deals with all our complaints. Make sure you have a way to close out the complaint with corporate and have some sort of corrective actions written up and documented.

In my experience typically food quality and safety complaints are ultimately handled by the QA and/or QC Manager, so complaints received by Customer Service or anyone else need to forward the complaint to the Quality Manager and this should be written as a SOP.

Next, an investigation including root cause analysis conducted in order to determine possible causes of the issue including such tools as interviews with pertinent production, shipping, sanitation, maintenance employees, etc. along with record reviews, root cause analysis tools if possible. If a root cause analysis points to a specific issue and/or set of issues) that may have occurred and likely caused the issue resulting in a complaint, corrective and/or preventive actions are implemented. This info should then be included in a concise report and sent to your customer, and everything should ideally be documented on a spreadsheet for quick access to show complaint trend analyses, reviews at food quality and safety meetings, your annual management reviews, etc.