Are people getting busted on this still for SQF audits? I have never been asked to see how we are accessing Food Safety Culture, never asked to see data or analytics in the 3 years or so since it's been added to the code. IMO you assess a site's FS culture based on what you see as you do the plant inspection and from your interaction and questions with the staff. I do have documentation and such in case it ever comes up and we do discuss and document it during management review, but I have never been asked to produce documents or records on this during and SQF audit. Could it be cause we are Food Packaging, though I don't think that should matter?
The plants within our company have been pressed on it for each audit I've witnessed over my past 2.5 years working here, but we've been compliant. My job is to provide a monthly meeting template for the plants where I run data/trending on our complaints, EMP monitoring, sanitation monitoring, hold and fm data, food safety objective review, etc. We include relevant FDA/USDA updates, review of national recalls each month, etc. Each plant has their management teams sign in and sit to review and discuss the reports each month, and they take notes of what they'll go and discuss with their teams based on these reports. Between showing our SQF auditor the meeting reports, and keeping track of the notes they take away from the meeting (including doing CAPAs when a trend move to unacceptable ranges), the auditors are pleased and mark us compliant.
Couple of my plants are going an extra step to perform a "Food Safety Culture Walk" on a checklist they developed. Taking the senior plant manager and a small management group to walk the building, discuss observations, and interview employees. I don't find much value in it, I don't think it measures things very efficiently, but auditors have expressed pleasure in seeing a cooperative management walk whereas so many times departments just want to argue with each other.
