SQT Blog

This is the question that European and Irish retailers are asking of themselves and their suppliers. European food safety legislation 852/2004 requires Food Business Operators (FBOs) to develop HACCP systems but what does this actually mean to people?

The production of safe food invariably comes down to three basic things in the majority of Food Businesses:
1 The control of contamination
2 The control of growth of microorganisms
3 The kiling of bacteria if the process is capable of doing so

Point 1 above is controlled by focussing on three simple things: Premises, Plant and People. 300 years ago when pigs were killed on the side of the street, people cleaned up after themselves as they knew before the advance of modern microbiology that dirt attracts rodents and all other nasty things. In modern food processing this is where the attention is now being focussed. Pre-operational hygiene inspections at 5am or 6am are becoming the norm in deciding whether these companies are suitable suppliers or not. There is no excuse for dirt, never has been, and never will be as dirt is visible. Visible organic matter left on a food contact surface for 10 hours at ambient temperature can cause a lot of damage.

Point 2 above is controlled by focussing on two simple ideas; temperature control and time control. These are quite easy to control as modern refridgeration allows us to set temperatures in any room to +/- 1deg. Time is controlled by dating and labelling of food.

Point 3 is controlled by proper cooking if cooking is a step in the process.

By looking after these three basic things, the food will invariably be safe. Simply Back to Basics. Sometimes the complexity of legislation unintentionally may take our focus off the basics.

Believe or not, a recent Black Belt Project in a large Service Organisation achieved over €100,000 per annum savings by focusing in on the dreaded world of paper, paper and more paper!!

The Project focused on:

– Reducing the number of reports being generated and issued

– Reducing the cycle time for the generation of the top 10 most time consuming remaining reports.

Commonsense one might rightly conclude but it is only when the organisation compiled and costed baseline data in the Define Phase of the DMAIC that the paper elephant in the room began to roar for attention.

Most impressively the Project Team decided to put Dumbo on a permanent diet by ensuring that any new reports being proposed were scrutinised with a value add and business case assessment before being approved.

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland, (FSAI) has called on food manufacturers to strengthen food allergen controls and labelling policies following an audit of compliance with allergen labelling legislation. Results of the FSAI audit, published in June of this year, revealed that the management and control of food allergens in some food businesses was insufficient to protect the health of people with food allergies or intolerances. The audit was conducted on a selection of small, medium and large food businesses and showed that food allergen labelling was applied in an inconsistent and sometimes incorrect manner.

More details on the audit can be found here.

We are currently taking bookings on our next Food Allergen Control training course on 11th October in Dublin. This course will provide an excellent opportunity for food businesses to review and strengthen their food allergen control and labelling policies.

There are essentially two types of data to be concerned about when devising sampling schemes:
– variables data, and
– attribute data

Variables data are related to characteristics that are measured, such as weight and length. Attribute data relate to characteristics that are assessed on a pass/fail basis, usually by visual inspection; e.g. presence or absence of visually identified defects, such as scratches.

There are two corresponding standards; a standard for inspection by variables, such as ANSI/ASQ Z 1.9, and a standard for inspection by attributes, such as ANSI/ASQ Z 1.4.

A key difference between inspecting by attributes versus inspecting by variables is the size of sample involved, with the sample size for inspection by attributes being much larger.

If you intend to inspect by variables (measurements) then you have the option of using either standard. It is very common, in my experience, to find that people devising sampling schemes in industry ignore the standard for sampling by variables, even though they intend to inspect by variables. Instead they use the corresponding standard for inspection by attributes. The consequence is that they frequently are inspecting unnecessarily large samples.

Suppose you have a lot of 10,000 parts to be inspected by variables. From Table 1, you could choose to inspect by attributes, draw a sample of size 500 and use a pass/fail approach to test the quality of the parts. Alternatively, you could use the standard for inspection by variables. If you have adequate historical data, typically obtained from previous inspections, which enables you to calculate the process standard deviation, you could use the Variability Known method, and the sample size could be as low as 44. Even if you don’t have the historical data necessary to establish the process standard, you can use the Variability Unknown method, in which case, the sample size will be reduced to 150, a considerable reduction from the 500 that applies in the inspection by attributes case.

Using the standard for inspection by variables involves calculating some simple statistics, easily performed with a hand-held calculator. It appears to me that that the need to get involved with statistics is sufficient to deter many people from using the standard for inspection by variables. Instead, they will suffer the unnecessarily large sample sizes that will result from use of the standard for inspection by attributes, and test the measured characteristics using a pass/fail approach.

Inspection personnel can be readily trained to use the appropriate standard for inspection by variables, and thereby greatly reduce the time involved in inspection, when the characteristics are measured.