Customer Contact Lists for Recalls
Good morning!
I work in a VERY small company which makes RTE gluten-free snack foods. I am the only person in the Quality Dept and have been tasked with finishing our HACCP program and getting us to SQF L2 certification (I started in June and mgmt isn't happy with a proposed pre-audit assessment in January but that's another story altogether).
We had a meeting yesterday to review and approve the recall program that I had written and I brought up customer contacts in the event of a recall. We have worked with a consultant whose more than 30 years in food safety has been primarily in the meat industry which has FAR stricter requirements than what we would work with so I'm not sure if I'm taking this too far. She stated the companies she's worked in have had an established customer contact list specifically for recalls with the name and number of someone that can be reached 24/7 along with a back up.
I brought this up with management and was told that it is unreasonable, especially for the smaller stores and distributors we work with. They said our purchasing contact is just fine and that is a list that is stored in QuickBooks which we can refer to if we need to get a hold of anybody. I instinctively balk at that.
What is everybody else doing? I'm completely okay with being wrong and being able to relax our standards but am NOT comfortable with being ignored and we do things incorrectly and my name is on it.
Thanks in advance for your help,
~Emily~
I think having a regular customer contact is suitable, possibly having a 2nd contact as a back-up for when the first is on vacation/away etc. It is unreasonable to expect all of your customers to have a 24/7 response person.
Thanks, qalearner. I'll discuss with management the possibility of getting a second contact person on record in the event of absence of our primary contact. I like being wrong about something like this because my being wrong means we can accomplish this faster - yay!
Regardless of whatever approach you take it will be imperative to demonstrate that the system works; so perhaps include this in your audit schedule as part of the traceability/recall system and test it.
You can also take the approach of asking for a 24 hr contact and see how many suppliers and/or customers fill it out.
All in all, remember that SQF code is an attempt at the universal, not all things there will apply to you, & what one company does many not be adequate for yours.
meat is a bit different.
Most have sales/marketing make contact by phone and e-mail.
Add layers if you want too.
You can also take the approach of asking for a 24 hr contact and see how many suppliers and/or customers fill it out.
All in all, remember that SQF code is an attempt at the universal, not all things there will apply to you, & what one company does many not be adequate for yours.
We tried this approach, and it seems that our sales department (the main contact with the customers) is the biggest obstacle we have to overcome. Purchasing, on the other hand, is really helpful in obtaining the vendors' contacts.
Good luck with the list and with getting certified.