How to choose a food safety auditor - Critical Characteristic 1, Approach
Julia Stewart:
Hello, this is PMA PR Director Julia Stewart, and I’m here today with PMA’s Chief Science & Technology Officer Dr. Bob Whitaker, and welcome back to PMA’s audio blog, “Ask Dr. Bob”. Bob, we’ve begun to look into the critical characteristics to consider when choosing a food safety auditor. Can you explain the first characteristic more for us now, and that’s the auditor’s approach?
Bob:
Sure , Julia. As I mentioned previously, selecting the proper auditor is crucial to getting a competent and effectively performed food safety audit. The first key characteristic I identified in my last post, is to understand the approach the auditor will take. Today, we see a variety of approaches. Some companies select a third party auditor to do their audits and supply this information to their customers as needed. In other cases, you don’t have much choice in selecting the auditor since the customer mandates that you use a specific third party company. However, in either case, it is important for you to take the responsibility of sitting down with the audit company and learn about their approach.
It’s important to be sure they do both pieces of a systems audit — the inspection, and the evaluation of verification documentation. Be sure your food safety auditor isn’t doing just a snapshot inspection of your operation. You want an audit that looks at the entire food safety system you have in place. Good auditors will look at your risk assessment and written food safety plan, physically inspect your operational processes, talk to your employees to see if they understand their roles, look at your equipment, and evaluate environmental risk factors and how you manage them. Then they will look at your verification records and see if they indicate you are following your food safety program every day.
The grower or processor being audited should have expectations of the auditor and how they will conduct the audit. You are paying for it so you should get some value. You need to establish up front that you expect the auditor to spend time on the inspection phase and completely look over your operation. You also need to clearly establish that you don’t want the audit to be a snap shot. In other words, you expect that the auditor will follow up on the inspection with a complete review of your food safety records to ensure that they verify adherence over time. The aspect of time indicates that the audit isn’t just measuring what you’re doing at the time of the inspection, but that your records indicate you follow your program every minute of every day that you operate.
Look, if you understand that the safety of your products is your responsibility, then you want an audit that helps you to measure the effectiveness of your food safety program. A good audit should be scientifically sound and systems-oriented. If you score a 95% on a haphazardly executed audit, what good does that do you?
Julia:
Well, Bob, you’ve certainly opened a new thought process on the interaction between a produce supplier and a third party auditor. Thank you. We look forward to next time when we’ll continue discussing these critical characteristics to consider when selecting a third party auditor.
Until then, thanks to our listeners for joining us!