Changing Training Dates

Hello Everybody,

We are SQF, low risk, single product, no CCP's.  We missed our annual training date, so if I do a training it will be over a year since the employees last received their training.  Will we be able to argue that even though we were about three weeks off on our training date that Senior Management and the Food Safety Team assessed potential impacts and there was no threat to food safety by being late?  We want to set up a training twice per year, so that all new employees will be trained in their first six months, and everybody gets their training done annually even if we somehow miss them in the future.  

Any thoughts or personal experiences will be appreciated!!

Your new employees should be receive food safety basic training at time of hire (CYA).  You can write a non conformance report on why the annual refresher was missed and what you're changing so it doesn't happen again.

I suggest you keep you language loose  (i.e once/year) are not yearly on the first monday in march. 

SQF V8 does not specifically say when training occurs so use a schedule that makes good sense for your organization.

Generally speaking, don't make the error of setting specific dates for training.  No reason to trip yourself up when you don't have to.

Your training should be noted as you note your internal audits to be within a range of time. Such as HACCP training will be during the fourth quarter, or GMP for employees will be in September, etc.

If you set exact dates for training and you miss that date - you can assume in advance that your Auditor won't miss that and will give it a minor in all likilihood.

Thanks guys I appreciate the responses.  I just found out our company procedures are what has us locked in, not the actual code.  This should be solvable!