Hello - New Member from Canada

Hello,


I have been reading your forums for a while now and finally decided to become a member. I appreciate your site and all it has to offfer, hopefully I will be able to contribute back. I have worked in the Food Industry for 11 years mostly in CFIA licensed plants.

Hello,
I have been reading your forums for a while now and finally decided to become a member. I appreciate your site and all it has to offfer, hopefully I will be able to contribute back. I have worked in the Food Industry for 11 years mostly in CFIA licensed plants.

Fantastic you decided to join us.

There are far many more anonymous readers here than registered members. It’s a shame as this place would be even more beneficial to everyone if more people would stick their heads above the parapet.

We look forward to your contributions EmHan.

By the way what is CFIA?

Regards,
Simon

Sorry,

CFIA is the Canadian Food Inspection Agency which is the organization that enforces the Canadian Food and Drugs Act.

http://www.inspectio...lish/toce.shtml

Have you heard much about the Canadian PAC Standard EmHan? Is it published yet? Is it taking off? I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

Regards,
Simon

To be honest with you I have not followed up on the progress recently as I am working in product development, but a set of standards are definately required to help suppliers.

The packaging materials hazard analysis on my last Haccp program was weak and basically relied upon using CFIA approved plastics from suppliers with industry recognized third party audits. Note :there is no substitution for actually visiting your suppliers if possible.
With that being said we still ran across problems such as incorrect ingredient declarations due to the supplier using previous generation printing plates. A receiving check of incoming ingredient declarations to current recipes is very important. We had one pallet of finished product boxes with two flavours intermingled, luckily our employee was able to recognise the error when packing our product. The box company was relient on an employee to clear the equipment between flavour changes and a few bundles of boxes were missed. They recently installed a bar code reader to help prevent that the problem.



The Packaging Association of Canada does have some sections of the standard complete however I have not read them yet.

http://www.pac.ca/se...pstandards.html

To be honest with you I have not followed up on the progress recently as I am working in product development, but a set of standards are definately required to help suppliers.

The packaging materials hazard analysis on my last Haccp program was weak and basically relied upon using CFIA approved plastics from suppliers with industry recognized third party audits. Note :there is no substitution for actually visiting your suppliers if possible.
With that being said we still ran across problems such as incorrect ingredient declarations due to the supplier using previous generation printing plates. A receiving check of incoming ingredient declarations to current recipes is very important. We had one pallet of finished product boxes with two flavours intermingled, luckily our employee was able to recognise the error when packing our product. The box company was relient on an employee to clear the equipment between flavour changes and a few bundles of boxes were missed. They recently installed a bar code reader to help prevent that the problem.
The Packaging Association of Canada does have some sections of the standard complete however I have not read them yet.

http://www.pac.ca/se...pstandards.html

Thanks for the link EmHan. I'm going to keep an eye on the standard.

I agree with you there is no substitute for a self audit or even a quick tour can uncover a great deal about a supplier.

BTW printing plate control (or lack of it) is a common problem in the printed packaging industry and is more important than ever for food safety and quality reasons.

Thanks,
Simon