Supplying Water to Employees in Canadian Manufacturing Facilities
I am a Quality Assurance Manager for a facility which provides GMP products to the Canadian market. We have a large, unconditioned warehouse area where we do secondary packaging of material (i.e., no food product exposed in this area). We recently were hit in an internal audit for having portable watercoolers near the packaging lines, due to Canadian regulations on where we are allowed to locate drinking water. The temperature in this area regularly gets into the high 30's, and Operations has reached out to ask where is the closest we can provide drinking water, as the current closest water source is hundreds of meters away. The water coolers we have are portable watercoolers with replicable jugs of water, and we provide paper cone cups so the employees cannot set cups of water down anywhere.
Hi Dan, welcome to the forum. I don't see why you cannot install a water cooler in your warehouse area if there's no food safety risk. Do risk assessment, make sure it's documented, train people on proper usage of watercooler - and go ahead.
I am a Quality Assurance Manager for a facility which provides GMP products to the Canadian market. We have a large, unconditioned warehouse area where we do secondary packaging of material (i.e., no food product exposed in this area). We recently were hit in an internal audit for having portable watercoolers near the packaging lines, due to Canadian regulations on where we are allowed to locate drinking water. The temperature in this area regularly gets into the high 30's, and Operations has reached out to ask where is the closest we can provide drinking water, as the current closest water source is hundreds of meters away. The water coolers we have are portable watercoolers with replicable jugs of water, and we provide paper cone cups so the employees cannot set cups of water down anywhere.
Hi Dan,
Do you know what the Canadian Regulations actually say/require ?
Charles beat me to this-----I think your auditor is sailing you upriver no such regulation exists (and further more, this sort of thing would be covered by the local health unit and/or ministry of labour not CFIA