3 replies to this topic

[SJ_LPCR]

I work at a public warehouse and we recently passed our SQF audit, but we did have one area of concern that I need some help with. We have a supplier approval program with supplier questionnaires for our contractors and suppliers, but the Auditor stated we need one for the customers that store there products in our warehouse, as they are "supplying us with business". 

 

We store food & feed, but also store non-hazardous products that are not related to food or feed. I am planning on having 2 separate questionnaires for food and non-food customers, but I am struggling finding examples that fit our needs. As a warehouse, we only store and ship already packaged food and feed products, and the examples I am finding seem to be excessive for needs and focused on food production. I am thinking the questionnaire should focus on questions to help us complete the risk assessment for the customers. Being a warehouse that only stores packaged finished goods we can have multiple products and multiple customers, so I am trying to keep it simple and manageable. 

 

Does anyone have any experience with this or suggestions that they can share?   

 

Thank you in advance! 

[Scotty_SQF]

You can keep it simple and stick to the basic food safety programs they should be doing, GMPs, Pest Control, Foreign material control, Food Defense, Inbound and Outbound practices, etc.  Basically what I tell people is if you are using the fact that you approve suppliers as any basis in your HACCP Plan, make sure you are asking those questions on a questionnaire to show that you are truly trying to evaluate this.

[SHQuality]

Scotty has touched on the main points you need to include. I would especially pay extra attention (in detail) to how your customers deal with pest control and inbound and outbound checks. If their products are contaminated with pests, those can spread to the other food products and if they open their products for quality checks, you can no longer claim you're moving closed boxes when it comes to risk analysis.

[jfrey123]

I had a similar circumstance for a dry goods pasteurization process.  The owners of the company had a large warehouse suite where the sterilization chamber was kept, along with all of the food stuffs, which was walled off and partitioned from the rest of the warehouse which stored all sorts of non-food goodies under a different business.  We created a map of the entire suite, and showed the other business' area as non-food and outside of scope, and this survived numerous SQF audits thanks to the physical separation of goods with our recognition that food would never leave the food area without being fully sealed (for loading/unloading of trucks) and never stored in the non-food area.

 

SQF auditors all insisted on still walking the non-food storage areas under justification of building security/food defense as well as pest control.  Having to walk an auditor down an aisle of children's toys, pool chemicals, 'adult' um.... items, and fertilizer always brought on some fun if not slightly awkward conversations.  But in our case, having the facility map, documentations to protect food in place, a physical barrier between the two parts of the warehouse, and the fact they were separate businesses, kept us able to navigate the SQF auditor's concerns.