After the food safety plan is written with your team, how often are team meetings required to take place?

After the plan is written with your team, how often are team meetings required to take place? Required not suggested..

Thanks.

The "FSMA" Preventative Controls Food Safety Plan

In the beginning, probably every month at least to address any issues brought up by your internal audits, which hopefully are occuring on a weekly schedule.

Your management team also needs to review the results of your entire food safety plan and any changes, corrective actions, complaints, etc.

Food Safety Team meetings are usually held monthly. We use them to cover trends even if everything is going well. We cover complaints, internal audits, pest control trends, GMP inspection/Sanitation numbers and trends, and any unusual incidents that may have occurred. These meetings are with senior management, to show their buy in, involvement, and that they know these going-ons as required by our SQF program. 

All plants that I have been in have them monthly. 

The next validation meeting can be held at around 1 year since the program was put into place.

We have quarterly HACCP meetings and monthly SQF meetings that we cover the things you mentioned above. So you have also seen the team that helped write the FSMA Food Safety Plan (which is separate then the SQF Team) monthly as well? 

I would say it all depends on your process. We meet minimum once a year or when we bring in new equipment, product, etc. that requires a re-evaluation of the plan. We are a low risk operation so that works for us (packaging rte snack foods operating mainly as a co-packer). But, if you are higher risk or have a more complicated/complex process then I could see meeting more frequently like mentioned above. 

That is exactly what I was thinking of doing. Just wasn't sure if there was a mandated required amount of times you needed to meet for FSMA. So far I have not found anything in writing.... 

I think the requirement is minimum once a year. Not sure if that was FSMA or SQF requirement... or I could be completely wrong. Either way, minimum once a year would still be a good idea to keep everyone informed and up to date on the food safety plan. 

Glad we could help!

SQF is minimum review of entire program by management once per year.

In my opinion, your HACCP Team needs to meet more often.  It will depend on how many changes need to be reviewed.

If you are in the early stages of your food safety program, you will need to meet fairly often.  Many of your audits will show changes and corrections that need to be made.  The HACCP Team needs to keep on top of making sure these changes and corrections are done in a reasonable amount of time.

The results of your internal audits will probably indicate how often the HACCP needs to meet.