In January of 2015, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) updated its Global Standard for Food Safety. This new standard, also known as issue 7, effectively replaced the old Issue 6 standard in July of 2015.
The question is, does your product inspection process meet BRC Food Safety Issue 7 standards for transparency and traceability?
What Do You Need to Track to Ensure Maximum Transparency & Traceability?
To ensure maximum transparency and traceability for your food inspection process, strong record-keeping is a must.
Not only should you have a record of whether a package passed or failed inspection, you should have data on:
- Rejection rates;
- Which ingredients had contaminants;
- What those contaminants were;
- Where the contaminated ingredients came from; and
- Possible sources of contamination.
It’s vital to have all of this data to ensure that you can trace contaminants back to their point of origin and remediate the issue.
Creating a Transparent and Traceable Product Inspection Process
One way to quickly and easily create a product inspection process that makes tracking this data easy is to use x-ray inspection machines in your production line. These devices can record important data such as an image of a rejected package’s contents, how many packages passed or failed the inspection over time, and more.
However, you can’t just slap an x-ray machine at any point in your production line and call it a day. To meet the BCR standard, you need to perform a thorough Hazard Analysis and pick out the best Critical Control Points to place your x-ray inspection machines as per the HACCP standard.
To abbreviate the hazard analysis process, the basic steps are:
- Create a production process flowchart;
- Note any hazards inherent to your product and its ingredients
- Identify potential process-related hazards; and
- Research those hazards and their significance/risk level.
After running the analysis, you can select one or more critical control points to place your x-ray inspection equipment for the greatest effect. In many cases, the best spots for an x-ray inspection machine include:
- Post packaging and sealing;
- At the ingredient inflow; and
- After processing.
These are the three points where most production processes will see the largest net benefit from adding an x-ray inspection machine.
Post-packaging checks act as a final quality assurance gate for manufacturers, while ingredient inflow checks can spot problems with ingredients that might indicate a supplier-side problem. Checking product just after a processing phase allows you to isolate issues such as fragments of processing equipment landing in your food product.
Having x-ray machines at each of these control points can massively improve traceability for your production process and make meeting the BRC Issue 7 standard easier.
Need help meeting BRC 7’s traceability and transparency requirements? Create a Plan for compliance by contacting us today!
