Food Safety Team

How should a food safety team be constituted? We have around ten personnel in our division and we had three members in the food safety team. Auditor was objecting to it saying that each department should be represented in the food safety team etc etc. Is it required?

Dear Sankara,

Which standard?
The absolute answer will I suppose depend on the text however broad participation is usually regarded as a necessity for Quality Management / risk evaluation, eg including production, engineering, purchasing whatever. Another query that comes up quite often is how many "qualified" HACCP people are required, this is also contentious and related to the exact situation IMO.

Rgds / Charles.C

Dear Charles,

We are going for ISO 22000 certification. The quality and production are handled by the same personnel. Purchasing is also handled by us as the main raw material , which is a fruit, is obtained from African forests. So here we do not follow the conventional purchasing strategies. As far as engineering part is concerned , they are roped in from the main plant only for preventive and breakdown maintenance.

As far as 'qualified HACCP' personnel are concerned, we do not have any. I have experience in ISO 9001 being the MR in the previous company and having passe the Lead auditor course for QMS.

We have conducted training sessions having roped in experts from outside and we do have regular internal training classes.

Regards,

A Sankara Narayanan

I would think it good practice to include a member from every department that can affect food safety and quality on your HACCP team. Why not?

Regards,
Simon

Dear Sankara,

I assume you do not have any existing (external) auditorial evidence of HACCP prowess – some situations require govt. approval of HACCP setup so as to export ??
As you will know, the auditors typically expect to see an appropriate QMS system + evidence of proper implementation as defined by the standard

I am speaking more from a BRC / HACCP background so the ISO22k auditors on this forum shd be able to give a more reliable comment however for sure you need a minimum of 1 person (this is referred in Codex I think) who can show evidence of participation in organised HACCP training courses, eg a (satisfactory) certificate + (hopefully) having sufficiently high educational background although the latter is presumably not mandatory if demonstrable experience exists. As usual it comes down to validation. If you have none, I should attend a course as fast as possible + include somebody(s) else, eg some definable production reps. etc (from the three??)
(Now I will probably get the ISO people shouting at me for inadequacy!)

Simon is right but IMEX the ease of practicality unfortunately relates to the situation / process / available staff etc, I think Codex is aware of this. I don’t know how ISO balance their expectations in this respect, you need to assess this one from observation of the local experiences / auditors etc.

Another option, at a cost, is to get a preliminary assessment of the situation by an appropriate auditor as to good / fair / impossible, may save you un-neccesary effort or vice-versa. Worthwhile IMO if you have limited baseline data.

Hope this not too vague to be useful,

Rgds / Charles.C

added - I went back to yr first post and saw yr comment so i guess the "prelim" idea is already redundant, sorry - as I noted, I'm not a specific ISO user so if there is a categorical requirement in the standard as to designated staffing personnel, it may be followed by the auditor however the degree of adherence is usually a grey area??