2 replies to this topic

[AOksanen]

Hello,

 

I am the quality manager of a factory in Finland manufacturing snacks made of pellets, extruded snacks and potato chips.

I'm currently working with our VACCP plan for BRC and specifically I'm trying to figure out the vulnerability assessment of our pellets and spice mixes.

The flours used with our extruder and potatoes used in making chips are relatively easy of course, but the pellets and spice mixes are causing my hair to go gray. We have a relatively large amount of them to go trough and the work required seems endless to me.

As I understand we would have to make an assessment for every ingredient of the spice mixes and pellets separately, which is of course a lot of work for which we may not have the necessary resources to do properly.

Would anyone here have advice on how to do assessments on ingredients such as these efficiently? Mainly I would be looking for advice that would allow us to go trough these in a way that would avoid unnecessary work and preferably create a plan with actual value to our production.

Thank you in advance for any potential advice.

[Evans X.]

Greetings,

 

Start with researching incident reporting sites (RASFF, FDA as well as sites from some individual countries food agencies that have relativley good reporting sections eg food.gov.uk in England, mpi.gov.nz in New Zealand/ efet.gr in Greece). Input keywords and search for incidents on the specific ingredients that concern you like spices, salt, whatever the pellets contain. Through this you will find out the frequency of fraud hits and the severity of them. This will be your starting point in your assessment.

Afterwards you should set-up a risk assessement for each raw material, add also some other parameters like supplier reputation/certifications, location of produced material (some countries with lax rules may be more suscptible to fraud), nature of the materials, ease of fraudulent acts on them, ease of detection, frequencty of checks, experience etc etc.

Score them, find out what needs more attention and set-up a control plan accordingly eg material A 1/delivery, material B 1/month, material C never, material D 1/year and so on.

It's a lot of work and it won't be too easy, but it will create something of real value which we will be easier afterwards to maintain and refresh and also backup your decision making for your sampling plans and controls.

 

Regards!

[Karenconstable]

Hi AOksanen,

 

It's okay to group incoming materials for a vulnerability assessment and this can reduce your workload signicantly. 

 

The best way to group materials and still get meaningful results is to start with a loose grouping, such as 'starches', 'flours' or 'powdered spices', and then proceed through a checklist of questions for each group.  During this process, if you get to a question where the answer for one ingredient (e.g. potato starch) is completely different to the answer for another ingredient (e.g. corn starch), then you need to 'ungroup' those ingredients.  Start again with a smaller group. 

 

The checklist I refer to is a list of characteristics to consider when estimating vulnerability.  These lists usually include items like 'Is there a history of food fraud for this ingredient?'; 'How complex is the supply chain?'; 'Is the ingredient expensive?'

 

Checklist ideas can be found in some guidance docs for food fraud/product fraud published by SQF, IFS, FSSC and BRC.  Also, past posts on this site have templates that users have shared (some are not very good, some are quite good). 

 

Using a checklist, and working with groups of ingredients can speed things up for you. 

 

To get a useful result your vulnerability assessment process should result in a clear indicator of risk for each group: high, medium or low.  The materials that are medium or high risk need to have mitigations/controls and these (of course) should be documented.  Low risk materials don't need mitigations/controls. 

 

If you need help with vulnerability assessments feel free to reach out to me directly, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn.

 

Karen