The Global Food Safety Initiative, or GFSI, imposes some strict compliance standards on companies wishing to be GFSI-certified.

A GFSI certification helps businesses prove that their food meets incredibly tough standards for safety and quality, opening new business opportunities and increasing consumer confidence. The question is, “Is your business ready for a GFSI audit?”

Before you answer that, there are a few things you should double-check first:

Have You Run a Gap Analysis Recently?

One of the first steps in prepping for a GFSI certification audit is performing a gap analysis to identify any critical gaps in your food preparation process.

How you can perform a gap analysis is covered in another blog post, but the basic idea is to outline your entire food production process from beginning to end. At every phase of your process, common risks and hazards should be noted, from risks inherent to the ingredients to potential hazards from the process or production environment.

Once the most significant risks have been identified, the next step is to do something about them.

Remediating Foodborne Illness Risks

There are a lot of different foodborne illness risks, far too many to cover every last one of them here.

Instead, we’ll focus on a few of the most common risks:

• Contamination Present in Incoming Ingredients. While it might be nice if all of the raw materials coming into your production line were free of any contamination, there’s always the risk that your supplier might have missed something or that a contaminant would be introduced in transit to your facility.
• Contamination from the Production Environment. Dust, dirt, remnant byproducts, and even the production equipment itself may pose contamination risks to your food. While following basic food handling safety guidelines should eliminate the majority of the worst risks, it’s important to go back over the production process to see if there are any major contamination risks in the facility itself.
• Mishandling of Food Product. Mishaps can occur in any food processing facility. From refrigeration unit failures that lead to spoilage, to cross-contamination of raw ingredients with other ingredients, accidents happen.

By identifying each of the above risks in your facility, you can make a plan to account for each one.

For example, you could add foreign body detection to your production line at the ingredient intake phase or just after processing to pick up physical contaminants in the product. The type of foreign body detection you add should be dictated by your biggest contaminant risks.

If metallic contaminants are the most common, then a metal detection or an X-ray inspection systemwould be ideal. However, if non-metallic dense contaminants are more common, then metal detection is ineffective and an x-ray system would be a the ideal option.

Remote monitoring of refrigeration units and other key storage equipment is also a good idea for anything requiring strict temperature controls.

Any quality control equipment used should meet certain basic guidelines. For example, metal detectors should meet at least six basic requirements for a GFSI audit, which we’ve outlined in another blog.

Document Everything

From the sources of your raw ingredients, to the processes used to turn them into product ready for shipment, to the control measures you put in place to remediate your biggest risks, it’s vital to have documentation for everything prior to getting your GFSI audit.

In fact, having a documented process for documenting quality controls and incidents is a key part of creating a safe production environment.

The more thorough your documentation, the easier it is to trace a safety incident back to its origin point. The easier it is to find the origin of a safety issue, the easier it is to correct.

Creating traceability through comprehensive documentation can make it much easier to make all of the improvements needed to pass a GFSI audit.

There are many components to making your business GFSI audit-ready. For more help and advice, check out some of our other resources, or contact Plan Automation today to get started!