A little background about our manufacturing facility:
- Products manufactured in this facility: confectionery products (e.g. Rainbow sprinkles, colored sprinkles, chocolate covered nuts)
- FSSC 22000 and Kosher certified.
- Geographical information: Southeast Asia, tropical climate (temperature ranges from around 25c to 36c with very high humidity all year round).
- Possible natural disasters: floods only, and due to being on the west coast of the country, we don't even get affected by the monsoon season like the east coast, so even when we do have floods, it's nothing severe. We also do not have any earthquakes or volcanoes too, no snow, no hurricanes, no yearly bush fires.
We currently do mock drills for only these scenarios (annually): fire, power failure, and water supply disruption.
And we always find a way to relate this to food safety by performing stock checks on our WIP materials and finished products as part of the emergency response plan. The thing is, we always perform these mock drills as a simulation, and we try to make it as close to reality as possible, as if it is actually happening. So like for a power failure, we would turn off the electricity for the section, or in the case of water supply disruption, we would turn off the water supply intentionally. These are all recorded in our emergency activity log and we specifically mention that they are turned off intentionally to simulate the actual scenario. For fire, of course we don't set up a fire in the plant, we would just specify that an imaginary fire is happening at a specific location of the plant, and as a simulation we would evacuate all employees out of the building.
My question is, is performing only these scenarios that were listed above, sufficient? or do we have to do mock drills for some other scenarios like floods, environmental contamination, workplace accidents?
We were told by our consultant to not "lie" or "pretend as things really happen" when recording mock drill activities in the log, which is why I find it hard if we were to do mock drills for any other scenarios that we can't really simulate in real time, as we can't just "pretend" like "oh, there's a huge flood incoming, water levels are getting high and it's starting to enter our production area and warehouse.
The point being, please let me know if it's okay for me to continue doing just these 3 mock drills annually (fire, power failure, and water supply disruption), we are not really looking to add more mock drills unless it's mandatory/necessary based on the ISO/FSSC standard.
Edited by ft.tgif, 23 December 2022 - 02:59 AM.