Internal Audit Food Traceability and Safety

Hi!

Im an internal auditor at a CPG company that competes with companies such as Kraft and Kellogs. Our team decided to perform an operational audit on Food Traceability and Safety. 

I don't think this has been done in the past here.

I was wondering, from your experience, where do you start? What are areas of risk? Any information you can provide really helps me.

Thanks,

Martina

The biggest omission is recipe adjustments being made and tracking amounts not flowed through properly...................i.e. the ingredient list modified, but batch records not adjusted accordingly

also, are you tracking waste correctly? Ingredients AND packaging

I agree with what Scampi just said and also add that problems come up with continuous operations, an example being making chocolate covered candies where the the hoppers are filled over and over again - but the company may have several suppliers of chocolate mixes and one is used at 8am, someone grabs a container and dumps it in at 10am but it is from a different supplier and no one makes note.

I walked into a company one day, what I would call BIG FOOD, like your company and looked at a mock recall and tracing report - I put it down and said, OK, that's not going to cut it  - so I picked out packaging and ingredient suppliers from their approved vendor list and said I'll be back in 24 hours - you have 24 hours to sort this out, do a tracing on every single ingredient and packaging pieces plus all inputs (sanitation, maintenance, etc.) and then do a mock recall on such and such that I picked out.

OK, so there was a certain amount of horror on their faces - but 24 hours later we were able to pinpoint exactly what the problems were and they are different at all companies regardless of size, even those using so called automatic mock recall systems.