Risk Assessment Floor Loading for Distribution

HI Everyone, 

my company is preparing for our SQF Certification next year in February and have come across an issue that i need some help on.

Does any other distribution center practice floor loading?

if they do are you GFSI certififed?

if so, how were you able to risk assess this practice?

Thanks!

Weebus!

Hi Weebus! 

We are not a distribution center, but we do sometimes distribute our product in our trucks floor loaded and sometimes customers come to our docks and floor load their product.  All of our floor loaded products are in cases and none of our products are RTE.  

For our risk assessment, we had the risk as being if the floor loaded product is not fully cased and in a sealed container, it could potentially cause a food safety issue. Reducing that risk is that only properly sealed cases are floor loaded and the vehicle is inspected prior to loading for sanitary conditions.  Our training/work instruction for shipping reflects these two checks as does our shipping checklist. 

Hope that helps

I would assess the safety of the floor. Because you know that a pallet would be acceptable, do a compare and contrast between the safety of the surface of your floor vs the surface of a pallet and perform a risk assessment from that perspective. If you can establish that the controls you have for keeping your floor clean and dry to the same standard as a generic pallet, I would use that to justify temporary floor loading.