10 Important Strategies for Food Safety Compliance

If you make food products for customers, you’re legally obligated to follow certain laws and regulations. Even if you weren’t, you would want to take extra precautions to make sure your food products were safe for your customers.

What makes food safety compliance so important? And what are the best strategies for achieving it?

The Value of Food Safety Compliance

There are some obvious and less obvious benefits of food safety compliance. Most food safety laws and regulations are designed to keep people safe and healthy. Complying with these standards is likely to make your customers safer when consuming your food products, which is a benefit in and of itself; however, this also has the additional benefit of improving your reputation and encouraging subsequent purchases. Additionally, remaining compliant means you’ll be less susceptible to fines and liability issues, which could otherwise significantly disrupt your business.

Important Strategies for Food Safety Compliance

These are some of the most important strategies for food safety compliance:

1. Invest in the right materials. First, you should consider investing in the right equipment and materials, which can make food safety compliance much simpler to navigate. For example, food contact compliant coatings offer a totally inert, non-reactive barrier, which prevents direct interaction between metal containers and the food products they contain. It’s a relatively inexpensive upgrade that can prevent a host of potential issues – and make sure your processes remain compliant with laws and regulations.  
2. Hire solid legal representation. Regulations can be complicated, as there are several authorities equipped to regulate food safety, and individual regulations aren’t always worded intuitively. Additionally, new regulations emerge almost constantly. Accordingly, it’s a good idea to hire solid legal representation, so you can always have a clear path forward.
3. Implement clear, consistent protocols. Within your business, try to implement clear, consistent protocols so that there’s always a formal, documented process in place for how to handle food products. Enforce these protocols to make sure they’re consistently implemented.
4. Conduct thorough education and training. Employee education and training are easy to implement, but tough to master. Your organization is only going to be as safe and compliant as your employees allow; because of this, it’s vital to make sure your employees have all the knowledge and practice they need to guarantee compliance for your business.
5. Provide visual reminders. Even with the best training program, it’s possible for people to forget things or suffer from lapses in judgment. Accordingly, you should consider placing visual reminders of your safety protocols and regulatory guidelines wherever appropriate; as a simple example, you can post instructions for proper hand washing above the sinks in your facility.
6. Make sanitation a top priority. Generally speaking, the cleaner your environment is, the safer and more compliant it’s going to be. Sanitation prevents and resolves a number of potential issues, and it doesn’t take much time or cost much money to practice. Make sure all your employees and supervisors are on the same page about maintaining a pristine, hygienic work environment.
7. Control for pests. You also need to control for pests. Rodents, insects, and other types of vermin can disrupt your operation and compromise the safety of your food products. If you can prevent them from gaining access to your facility, you can prevent a host of potential issues.
8. Segregate your products completely. Aim to segregate your products completely, especially if you have any food products or ingredients that are known to be common allergens. If you process nuts, for example, you should keep them totally separated from any lines and products that don’t contain nuts.
9. Track everything. You should also implement a very thorough, precise tracking system, and preferably one that’s automated. This way, you can understand how, where, and when all your food products are processed, and you’ll be able to track down issues quite reliably. If there’s ever an issue with contamination or something similar, you can quickly issue a recall and retrieve only the affected products, and if there’s ever an unexplained consequence to your production, you’ll be able to conduct a root cause analysis in short order.
10. Create a crisis management plan. Even if you’re extremely careful, there’s always the possibility that something can go wrong. Accordingly, you need to have a crisis management plan in place. How are you going to handle reporting and communication? Who is the point person in your organization who will take the lead in responding to the crisis? Which protocols will they follow to keep people safe and get your organization operational again as quickly as possible?

Food safety compliance is something you must take seriously if you want your business to succeed. Thankfully, these strategies and others can make food safety compliance much easier and smoother to implement.