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Can workers come in from home with their uniforms?

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Ronald40928

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Posted 24 July 2017 - 08:59 PM

Good morning everyone,
 
We are a macadam nut processing company, and we are looking for a SQF certification, and we have the following question.
 
Can workers come in with their home uniforms, and before we enter the process area do we provide a type of lab coat to protect the product?
 
I hope some expert can help me.
 
Thank you very much


SQFconsultant

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Posted 24 July 2017 - 11:33 PM

I assume you mean "street clothing" when you say their home uniforms?  If so, the answer would be yes for the lab coats assuming they come in clean street clothing.  Good idea for captive shoe program too.


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jechevarria

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Posted 24 July 2017 - 11:55 PM

Hi, I´m from the same company as Ronald, and I´ve been wondering the same thing too. 

 

This is our procedure about cloth and uniforms:

Our plant workers in touch with the product use a uniform, it consist of a t-shirt with the company logo and pants (sincatex) like a nurse pant. They came from home with this uniform. Once in the plant, we provide them with a long sleeve coat, like a lab coat, to process the product. They wear the coat, above the uniform. We have our own laundry, and we wash all the coats every shift. Everyone wash and change their uniforms at home, we provide 4 set of uniforms to each worker.

 

Is there an issue (for SQF auditor) about people using this cloths under the coat, since they wear this outdoor ??



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Posted 25 July 2017 - 08:23 AM

You should run a risk analysis about allowing employees to wash their t-shirt and pant unuforms.

You can control the laundering of the coats in the facility however you have no control on how the balence is laundered and as a former SQF Auditor that is what I would be looking for.


All the Best,

 

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Glenn Oster.

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SQF System Development | Internal Auditor Training | eConsultant

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http://www.GCEMVI.XYZ

http://www.GlennOster.com

 


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Peaches

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Posted 25 July 2017 - 10:56 AM

Hello

At my previous employer we were SQF certified and we did not issue uniforms to our employees.  Workers wore their street clothes into the facility and then were given a lab coat to cover their clothes before entering production.  We also issued disposable boot covers.  Although your workers are wearing a uniform, because they are taking them home and wearing them outside, the uniform in essence becomes their street clothes.

 

We performed a risk assessment and had our lab coats cleaned with a validated program through a third party HACCP certified company.  Have you performed a validation on your cleaning process for the lab coats?  During our SQF audits we had to show the cleaning process from the third party company.  In addition we had to show our results from swabs throughout the year on 'dirty' lab coats and the clean ones to validate our program and support our risk assessment.    



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majoy

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Posted 27 July 2017 - 06:59 PM

Hi, I´m from the same company as Ronald, and I´ve been wondering the same thing too. 

 

This is our procedure about cloth and uniforms:

Our plant workers in touch with the product use a uniform, it consist of a t-shirt with the company logo and pants (sincatex) like a nurse pant. They came from home with this uniform. Once in the plant, we provide them with a long sleeve coat, like a lab coat, to process the product. They wear the coat, above the uniform. We have our own laundry, and we wash all the coats every shift. Everyone wash and change their uniforms at home, we provide 4 set of uniforms to each worker.

 

Is there an issue (for SQF auditor) about people using this cloths under the coat, since they wear this outdoor ??

 

Why don't you just issue the uniform (t-shirt and pants) at the start of the shift so they can change into it before production? Since the staff go to and from work in these clothes, these are considered street clothes. How high risk is your production? Did the uniform policy came about due to risk assessment or more for uniformity of employees and identification? If you do risk assessment, you can or may get away with just providing lab coats for processing the product.


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