According to our Safefood 360 ° RISK assessment tool report, there are over 1,723 food safety alerts recorded in worldwide.
January: 339 cases
February: 297 cases
March: 488 cases
April: 382 cases
May: 217 cases
The top 5 alerts come from (in descending order): Turkey (273), India (150), France (95) and Poland (89).
The top 5 alerts are categorised (in descending order): Fruits and vegetables (397), nuts & nuts related product (179), dietetic foods & food supplement (144), herbs & spices (133), and food contact materials (106).
The top 5 alerts relate to (in descending order): Pesticide residues (485), not categorised (420), pathogenic micro-organisms (290), mycotoxins (242), and heavy metals (63).
(To understand the hazards, download our technical datasheet)
The top 5 actions taken are (in descending order): Official detention (317), withdrawal from the market (208), destruction (197), informing recipients (161), and re-dispatch (130).
On average, there are at least 5-10 food safety hazard alerts in the world everyday that can directly affect your food business and supply chain.
Click here to talk with our technical specialists about how we can help.
Earlier this month more than 600 food safety professionals from the world’s leading brands joined us for the first exclusive look at our latest solution, Safefood 360° Risk.
This new low-cost solution enables food safety practitioners to not only look at their food supply chain holistically, but also drill down into the products, materials, and entities within it to uncover and reveal what potential risks may exist within their supply network.
Safefood 360° Risk offers a quick and easy solution to these challenges while allowing food businesses to reduce the overhead and obstacles they may have in risk monitoring, planning, and decision making.
Available completely separate or as an enhancement to our core Food Safety and Supplier Quality Management solutions, food safety practitioners can now gather and use big data sources to provide a fast and clear measure of risk in the supply chain, quickly scan for trends that might affect them, and feed this information directly back in the development of their local HACCP and PCP plans.
During this live one-hour presentation and Q&A, Safefood 360° founder and Director of Digital Innovation, George Howlett, presented multiple scenarios and best practices for how to use the tool.
Purpose-built for risk assessors, auditors, and retailers who want to conduct more robust risk assessments, the demo covered these scenarios through a detailed overview of three new solutions, RASFF Risk Report, Trend Report, and the Risk Scanner report:
The webinar also took a deep dive into how the tool can be used to solve everyday queries and concerns for the food safety practitioner by enabling them to connect directly to big data sources and answer the following questions:
If you would like more information on using Risk and harnessing the power of big data to underpin your assessments and decisions, click the button below and one of experts will be in touch to discuss how we can help you secure your supply chain.
Safefood 360° CEO George Howlett recently presented a webinar in collaboration with the International Food Safety and Quality Network (IFSQN) on pragmatic steps that can be considered when building a Risk & Compliance model for Food Safety Management Systems.
The recent publication of the ISO 22000 standard earlier this year has introduced changes to how Food Safety Management standards can look.
In general, this means a trend is becoming prevalent of food safety systems that are genuinely based on risk throughout, from top level to the smallest activity and task that might be conducted in a business.
This is also occurring with a greater alignment in the approach businesses take in identifying risk and opportunities for improvement.
This webinar is presented below in full and examines the methods and models for measuring Compliance and Risk across food safety management systems.
This includes the appropriate methods for single site and corporate environments, and also address the difference between measuring compliance and measuring risk, with particular focus on ISO 22000 and FSSC 22000.
To learn more about how Safefood 360° can be implemented in your business to assist with your food safety management system, contact us below for a product demonstration.
Enforcement of new legislation such as the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), and new requirements from GFSI standards such as BRC, has placed increased pressure on food companies to fully know their supply chain.
This means that supply chain risk management has become an area of increased attention for food companies in recent years.
Other factors such as recent food fraud incidents, the most notable arguably being the horse meat scandal in 2013, are increasing the need for a secure, safe and an authentic food supply chain.
Sourcing of food and ingredients from across the globe is a growing trend as businesses are no longer limited to the first-tier supplier, manufacturer or distributor.
The result of this is that the food industry’s supply chain continues to evolve and grow in complexity.
This might mean that it is likely that one or more ingredients in a given product could be sourced from non-domestic entities.
The consequence of this is that the number of agents or brokers found in the supply chain has increased and need to be accounted for.
This means that the potential of risk in the supply chain has increased, and that, in order to be most effective, a business needs to be more vigilant in how it risk assesses its suppliers.
The burden of requiring businesses to conduct risk assessments for all suppliers and materials has increased over the years.
A lack of an understanding of potential risks may lead to food safety and quality failures, and potentially result in damage to all companies exposed to the risk, both in terms of customer confidence and monetary value.
Therefore, it is wise that businesses risk assess suppliers before they receive materials, so as to mitigate against the likelihood of being affected by an unsatisfactory product.
Think of suppliers as being an extension to your company
When doing so, it’s important to think of suppliers as being an extension to your company, as if there is a risk in your finished product, your customer may not distinguish between where the fault originated and who was responsible.
When assessing suppliers, the 2-Dimensional matrix of Probability by Severity fails as it does not cover the multiple criteria that impact on the risk of a supplier and its products in the supply chain.
This type of risk model has a high degree of uncertainty and limits, whereas a criteria-based model can be considered a more robust approach with lower levels of uncertainty while allowing for multiple risk criteria.
When defining the criteria for supplier risk assessment, one should think about the type of supplier they have.
When defining the criteria for supplier risk assessment, one should think about the type of supplier they have
For example, you may need to have different criteria for an ingredient supplier compared to a packaging supplier.
As the considerations for each vary, below is an example of some of the key aspects one should keep in mind when considering their risk assessment strategy.
A good starting place when determining your risk assessment is to consider if the supplier has achieved a 3rd party certification standard such as GFSI, which is now becoming a common requirement when doing business throughout the supply chain.
Generally, this is a common criterion which can be used when risk assessing your supplier that may save time and resources.
Knowing that your supplier is working to the requirements of a standard can be reassuring as it should indicate that they will be supplying acceptable materials while protecting public health, and if not, well, the risk associated with conducting business with that supplier will need to be considered.
If a supplier is from a high risk rated country, the likelihood of fraud could increase.
Of course, to give an answer to each criterion you need evidence and be able to provide a justification for your answer.
To help in determining this answer, you could endeavor to use fully objective data where possible.
In these instances, referring to the Worldwide Governance Indicators to see what countries present a higher risk may be beneficial, especially when knowledge of the area within the organization is lacking or altogether absent.
If a supplier has had a history of food fraud it may be likely to happen again.
Therefore, integrating the history of food fraud implication into your risk assessment model for suppliers may also be a pragmatic step to consider.
The greater the volume of materials to be supplied, the greater the exposure to an organization could be, should an issue arise.
As dependency increases, whether it be for a scarce, proprietary or key product or material, or simply due to the ease of relationship between the organization and supplier after a history of uneventful supply, this should be borne in mind to mitigate against the risk in the event of an issue occurring.
It can also be prudent to consider whether your supplier has additional allergens handled in their facility compared to yours.
If they have peanuts, for instance, and you do not have this as an allergen in your site, then there could be a risk of this allergen arriving in the material they will send you and you distribute to your customers.
Considering whether or not the supplier holds an efficient food defense plan may also be wise.
If a supplier has procedures in place to prevent intentional contamination and has protocols in place to quickly identify and control threats or acts of intentional contamination, this will lower the risk of the supplier.
Measuring the number of recalls, alerts, notifications, withdrawals and/or sanctions over a recent period may indicate the level of risk with a particular supplier.
Recall of products can have significant effects on other parts of the supply chain and so risk can be spread through the supply chain.
Consider if the supplier issues certificates of analysis for each delivery of materials.
If they do not, then this can add to the supplier’s risk.
As mentioned earlier, an organization may have different criteria depending on the supplier type.
A criterion specific for a meat supplier would be integration, i.e., is the facility fully integrated or is the slaughterhouse/cold store external?
If a facility is not fully integrated, the entities among the supply chain increase and so too will the risk of the supplier as more control is needed to ensure the integrity of the product.
Another supplier specific criteria (again for the example of a meat supplier) would be species.
A multi-species supplier site with shared production lines would carry a higher risk than a designated line per species or a single species site.
For a supplier of packaging, you also need to create your own criteria for risk assessing them.
For example, is the supplier a primary or secondary packaging supplier.
Of course, if they are a primary packaging supplier the risk to your material, if there is an issue, is much higher as it will be in food contact.
For a packaging supplier, you may also have a criterion called foreign body control program.
If your supplier doesn’t have a programme in place, then this will add to their risk as a supplier.
For the list of criteria above some may be considered more important and hold more weight than others.
For example, if a supplier doesn’t have a GFSI cert, and if a supplier doesn’t provide Certs Of Analysis, you might decide to consider the fact that the supplier doesn’t have a GFSI cert as much more important than them not providing Certs Of Analysis.
In this instance, you could, therefore, assign risk values to criteria and weight them.
Once you risk assess your supplier, you may need to put controls in place to mitigate the risk the supplier poses.
High-risk suppliers may require more information and diligence for approval or even an onsite audit.
Once your supplier has been risk assessed and approved, then you can turn your attention to risk assess the materials they will provide you.
Again, using a criteria-based risk assessment model, you can risk assess your materials.
For example, does the material have a history of substitution or adulteration?
For this particular criteria, you could refer to objective data from sources such as HorizonScan.
Other criteria for material risk assessment might include, the country of origin of the material, is there a vulnerability assessment for the material and are there hazards in the delivered material expected that need controls.
The bottom line is that a company’s reputation may be tarnished if there is an issue that necessitates a product recall.
Ensuring suppliers are risk assessed regularly will significantly reduce the risk of you inadvertently approving a supplier which could cost you in the long term.
Think of it this way, your supplier’s risk is also your risk.
Your supplier’s risk is also your risk
With this acknowledged, it seems the shift towards multi-criteria-based assessments over a simple matrix will continue and the number of risk assessments on a given supply chain will continue to increase as well.
Moving forward, it would be prudent for an organization to streamline their supplier assessment workflows starting with data collection, risk assessment, risk mitigation, and reporting.
It would also be worth considering using supply chain maps and dashboards wherever possible to enhance reporting in regard to suppliers.
Lastly, it is good practice to keep all supplier data in one database to ensure that there is one version of the truth.
Keep all supplier data in one database to ensure there is one version of the truth
Software such as Safefood 360° allows you to assess your suppliers and keep all records in one quick-to-access location.
You can create linkages between suppliers and the materials they provide you and of course use criteria-based risk assessment models to risk assess your suppliers.
This will allow you to access supplier information with just one click, and will also allow for greater visibility and traceability, which is becoming such an important factor in the food industry due to regulations.
Ultimately, what is most important is that whatever system you prescribe to, allows your organization to act with confidence in the market and put forward the most secure and safe product possible for your customer.
Following the launch of our new Risk Assessment Modelling feature (RAM), which now allows you to build any number or type of risk assessments in the Safefood 360° platform, we are delighted to explain a little more about how it can assist you in risk assessing non-HACCP type processes, such as management and PRP’s.
In any food safety management system, there are three main pillars:
All three are required for effective food safety management, and all contribute in some way to the level of risk associated with producing safe food.
Traditionally, risk assessment as a tool was confined to the risk management aspect of the total food safety system.
In recent years, however, the requirement to conduct risk assessment has expanded beyond this to other areas.
For example, many of the GFSI standards now require risk assessment to be conducted on calibration programs.
What has risk got to do with a calibration program you may ask? Surprisingly, a lot!
Let’s take for example a CCP such as cooking.
We have a thermal kill step which is designed to eliminate a pathogenic hazard such as Salmonella.
As part of HACCP, we are required to define critical limits for time and temperature, in this case, and monitoring each cooking batch or continuous process (usually the core product temperature).
For this, we use a thermograph, which plots time versus temperature, to allow us to determine if the critical limits are being met.
If not, we can then take corrective action. We will all be familiar with this approach. It is logical, practical, and achieves the desired result of a safe food product.
Risk assessment, in this case, was used effectively to identify the hazard at a specific process step, the CCP and all the related limits and actions.
However, underlying all of this is an important omission!
We are using a measuring device to achieve all this (thermograph).
We are, at all times, working on an assumption that when this device says we achieved 72°C for 2 minutes that we have in fact achieved this.
The whole critical control framework is dependent on an assumption – that the device is calibrated. No matter how well we risk assess and plan around the CCP, if the device is providing inaccurate data then we are not in a good place.
This brings us to calibration then.
We recognize that the supporting calibration program is essential in the control of the CCP.
The CCP is only as strong as the calibration program behind it.
We may say without any further analysis that the calibration program is by definition high risk.
But this is not sufficient.
We must now, as part of modern food safety management, subject this and all calibration programs to a smart risk assessment, document it, and explain our logic.
This is a shift for many food businesses.
However, as we will soon discover, our traditional understanding and approach to risk assessment used for HACCP in the past appears to break down when we try to apply its systems, such as calibration and auditing.
The question is why?
Let’s focus a little on Internal Auditing.
This is a core management process and essential for good food safety management.
Nothing new in this.
However, not all auditing activities are equal.
Not all are as critical or high risk in terms of food safety.
Like calibration and our thermograph, not all auditing activities play the same role in food safety, and we must apply risk assessment to figure out which are more important.
Under GFSI and other standards, you are required to develop an internal audit program based on risk or risk assessment.
If we take that your audit program includes an audit of your HACCP plan (a full check that the HACCP system was developed against the requirements and is being effectively implemented), you may also have another separate audit program which checks that the office supplies procedure is being followed.
Clearly, these are two very different audits and both carry very different risks.
But what exactly are we risk assessing?
Unlike HACCP we do not have a clear ‘hazard’ to assess.
We can say for an auditing activity that a specific hazard, such as Salmonella, is the issue. We start to see the traditional approach breaking down.
When it comes to programs and systems like auditing and calibration, we need to change our focus as we are not looking at the risk posed by a specific food safety hazard.
Instead, we are looking at the risk posed by a failure of the activity, e.g., the likelihood that the audit may not be carried out, or carried out poorly, and what would the adverse outcome of this be, e.g., a recall, food safety issue, or so on.
This, essentially, is the Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) approach, which is widely used in emerging companies to identify specific failures in machine and process that may lead to down time, rejects, poor efficiency and quality.
HACCP was initially based on this model but shifted away from this core nature of FMEA.
Now, it has come full circle and we are returning to these principles.
We can now ask what is the possibility that a certain audit program could ‘fail’ (probability), and if it was to fail, what would the adverse outcome (severity) be.
We are looking more at the nature of an activity rather than a specific hazard.
One of the core strengths of SF360° is now you can risk assess any program or activity in your food safety system – not just HACCP – under the new RAM feature when you are now building your programs for auditing, calibration, pest control, maintenance, cleaning – everything.
This is important since all Food Safety Management Systems should be Risk-based.
All Food Safety Management Systems should be Risk-based
For this to happen we need to conduct risk assessment.
If your entire food safety system is risk-based, it can open up for you a whole new level of control and oversight.
It can allow you to focus your system on where it matters, and in Safefood 360 we do this perfectly.
I am going to provide you with an example of how the new RAM works for internal auditing programs.
Let me set the scene for you.
Safefood 360° allows you to develop a specific risk assessment model for Auditing in this case.
We will use a simple 3×3 matrix for this one – probability x severity. But how does this look? Below is an example of how the model can be defined for auditing.
Here, we have a 3×3 matrix based on probability and severity.
In order to effectively use this matrix, the assessor must predefine what each rating value represents.
Below is a typical example.
In this model, probability is looking at the likelihood that the activity being audited, e.g., HACCP, will fail.
When we say fail we mean that the elements of the HACCP system do not operate or are unfulfilled in some way.
We can see, for example, that value 3 for probability states: “Failure of the activity being audited is likely to happen often or frequently. This approach makes the job of the assessor much more focused and objective.
| Failure of the activity being audited is likely to happen, often, frequent | Failure of the activity being audited is likely to lead to an immediate / grave health impact, recall or regulatory issue | |||
| Failure of the activity being audited can happen, but not frequent | Failure of the activity being audited is unlikely to pose an immediate / grave risk to the consumer but repeated failure over time may | |||
| Failure of the activity being audited is unlikely to happen, rare, remote | Failure of the activity being audited is unlikely pose an immediate / grave risk to the consumer |
The key element of the risk model is that the decision outcomes or control are applied.
In this case, if we obtain a high-risk rating, then we must audit the activity at a frequent level, e.g., every 3 months.
Lower risk activities are audited less frequently. This is consistent with the requirements of GFSI standards, e.g., the BRC.
| Audit the activity at a frequent level – minimum every 3 months | |
| Audit the activity at a reduced level – minimum every 6 months | |
| Audit the activity at a minimum level – minimum every 12 months | |
In Safefood 360°’s new RAM model, the above RA model can be built quickly and easily.
In the model building section of the Risk module, you can define this as follows:
Both the Probability and Severity ratings are defined in a grid with the associated values. Following this, the risk ranges or categories can be defined in the software.
The user can define any number of risk ranges or categories, e.g., Cat 1 Risk, Cat 2 Risk, etc., instead of the traditional High, Medium, or Low.
You can also color code the risk and define the required control or decision to be made once the risk has been obtained.
The user can also define if the risk is significant or non-significant.
Once the model is defined, it can be applied to the standard workflow for setting up an audit program or activity.
For example, if you are creating an audit program for HACCP or PCP, you can then conduct a risk assessment of the program based on the model.
Above, we can see that this auditing activity, looking at HACCP, has been assessed as Medium Risk, and therefore, the audit frequency has been set at 6-monthly intervals.
The new RAM feature in SF360° allows you to risk assess every activity in your Food Safety and Quality Management System and, therefore, to build a truly risk-based system.
It’s simple and easy and we are here to assist you getting it set up.
Safefood 360°, built by a group of food safety experts in 2010, is designed to tackle the real difficulties facing food-related industries by combining Food Safety Management and Supplier Quality Management Solutions with over 35 pre-set modules – creating a fast, secure, and audit-ready working environment.