From a food perspective, I would say it means if you make food with a supermarket's brand on it, you must be able to contact them and also the local authorities if necessary (those would be the stakeholders in my opinion).
Our customer says that we should be able to inform them of a potential recall situation within 20 minutes of us being aware of it whether that is day or night. I think within an hour is probably fast enough.
As you are asking in the packaging section; this is what I would do. I would have a crisis manual and all managers on site know where it is. Think about who would co-ordinate a fire evacuation any time of day or night, the same person could be your crisis manager.
In the crisis manual, I would put a list of contact details of senior managers in order of who should be contacted (probably Factory Manager, then Technical Manager), an explanation of what a crisis is (this manual could cover more than food safety). Then I would put in a checklist of what to do / what info to find out, e.g. batch codes and quantities affected, which customers have received product etc. but it needs to be emphasised that it's better to call all your customers if you don't know that than delay excessively. Then I would put in contact details (including out of hours) for all of your customers.
Once you have a manual in place, people will need training against it and it must be regularly reviewed (suggest monthly) as contact details change. I found two crisis manuals at my last place of work which were 3 issues out of date!
Then, you need to test your ability to recall product. To do this, get someone to chose a product or a customer batch, then you have to work out how much product could be affected and where all affected product has gone. You should aim to do this in 20 minutes ideally and if your traceability systems are robust, that should be possible. Remember you should test this on days, nights and at weekends and aim to do this probably every 2 months with different employees completing the task. What I always do is reconcile how much product I have made with how much I can account for through despatch to ensure that some hasn't gone to another customer by mistake. This can give you a percentage of your ability to recall product and a time it took which is easy to make into a KPI.
Hope that's helpful
Edited by GMO, 24 April 2008 - 07:13 AM.