Protective Clothing as per BRCGS Packaging

We have a Food grade packaging materials manufacturing unit with BRCGS packaging standard. 

Also we have a non-food grade packaging materials manufacturing unit.  We are going for BRCGS for this unit as well. DO non-food grade unit employees need to wear protective clothing for this audit ? can some one help us..

Hi Manoj,

This would depend on what the packaging materials manufactured in the “non-food unit” are and if they fall into ‘other hygiene-sensitive products’. Typically protective clothing is required (by the BRCGS standard) to be worn in production areas at sites manufacturing materials for direct contact with food or other hygiene-sensitive products unless otherwise justified by risk assessment.

BRCGS Requirements for 6.5 Protective clothing Interpretation:

Protective clothing includes uniforms, overalls, head coverings (such as hats and hairnets), shoes and boots, and gloves. Clothing of a suitable design must be provided to staff, visitors and contractors by the company.

Protective clothing protects the product from contamination. This set of requirements utilises hazard and risk analysis to determine whether a site needs to enforce the wearing of particular types of protective clothing.

Risk assessment establishes whether there are any additional hazards to the safety, integrity or legality of the packaging material from staff not wearing protective clothing. Where protective clothing is not required, the auditor will expect to see a robust risk assessment supporting such a stance while complying with any mandated specifics.

Note that this clothing does not refer to personal protective clothing that protects the employee from health and safety hazards. This set of clauses refers to clothing that protects the product from the worker.

Kind regards,

Tony

We are a packaging company (paper based products) with some sites that do food contact and most that do non-food contact. None of our sites wear special clothing, but the food contact sites do require hair nets/beard nets. Our procedures define what is acceptable attire (clean, no adornments that could fall off, etc.) but this is the same for all sites.

The sites we have that are GFSI/BRC certified for Packaging have been so for almost 10 years, many of them were AIB inspected before that and this has never been an issue.

I would agree with Tony-C that it really depends on the type of packaging you are producing.