How much time should be allocated to QA and food safety activities?

Welcome to a new week folks.

We are a small bakery (although large by artisan standards) that is preparing a written food safety plan to be compliant with FSME.

One question I have is are there industry standards for number of hours a week a business like ours should be allocating to making sure the plan is working correctly.  We have about 140 employees (this includes a retail shop, delivery drivers, sales, marketing and administration) and operate in a total space of 20,000 square feet, of which 14,000 is production and 3200 warehousing.

Most of our processes are manual--no conveyers or extruders. We do virtually now storage of finished items,a ll bread and most pastries are shipped out the night they are baked.

About how many hours a week should we be allotting for inspections, verification and validation activities, education? 0.25 FTE/10 hours a week?

Thanks,

Welcome to a new week folks.

 

We are a small bakery (although large by artisan standards) that is preparing a written food safety plan to be compliant with FSME.

 

One question I have is are there industry standards for number of hours a week a business like ours should be allocating to making sure the plan is working correctly.  We have about 140 employees (this includes a retail shop, delivery drivers, sales, marketing and administration) and operate in a total space of 20,000 square feet, of which 14,000 is production and 3200 warehousing.

 

Most of our processes are manual--no conveyers or extruders. We do virtually now storage of finished items,a ll bread and most pastries are shipped out the night they are baked.

 

About how many hours a week should we be allotting for inspections, verification and validation activities, education? 0.25 FTE/10 hours a week?

 

Thanks,

Hi jpollock, 

I think you would first need to decide what you want and how to inspect (CCPs, metal detectors, baking core temperature, appearance, slicing, creaming, seeding parameters, softness) before you can decide how many hours are needed to complete a round of inspection. Depending on your level of confidence of the entire process line, personnel, machinery etc, you then decide the frequency of inspections.

I think how many hours you want to allot to inspections are entirely up to you as long as you are able to prove to auditors or regulatory bodies that your food safety plan is robust, implemented and verified to be effective.