Hiring outside food services is becoming more and more popular in the world of golf course management, but who is responsible for the safety and quality of food being served to customers? Paul Medeiros dives into the elements of a good foodservice contract, ensuring safety and quality food.
Download the article, Avoid the Blind Spot, to learn more.
Originally published in Golf Business Canada.
We see that each individual food business is faced with growing compliance expectations and each must find a way to manage that risk throughout its entire supply chain. As an industry, there’s been a general trend toward suppliers meeting the GFSI food safety benchmark, as it demonstrates a level of understanding of food safety risk. Asking small suppliers to pass a third-party audit, particularly to a GFSI recognized standard, can be overwhelming and simply not realistic. We are asking these small suppliers to lift a weight that is too heavy, without having the training and time to cultivate a culture to build up strength.
As an industry we often find ourselves purchasing from suppliers that we know cannot meet the same food safety standards as the rest of our suppliers – but we need them. These enterprising suppliers are innovative and make unique products, and they help our business. They help us meet claims for local or organic, or have a story that we want to share and consumers want to hear.
In working with food supplier management programs for many years, and recently spending some time visiting and engaging with many small, local or regional suppliers, I am really encouraged by the trends I see. There are excellent examples of large multinational companies heavily investing resources and mentoring their small suppliers to a higher standard of food safety – a win-win for both the buyer and the supplier. We are proud to work alongside some of these food industry leaders.
Working with suppliers that are still developing their food safety programs is an immense opportunity for knowledge-sharing. In this spirit, we take this opportunity to share some strategies that we have seen to be successful in engaging small suppliers, and could be adapted in your programs:
This is as a wonderful chance for our industry to teach these small, local and regional suppliers, and to become mentors. Often, they really do not know what is being asked of them. I want to encourage those in this position to explain and demonstrate food safety and quality compliance. It helps the entire food industry.
Author: Renata McGuire is an Associate Manager, Food Safety for the consulting team at NSF providing services that help companies manage the food safety and quality of their supply chain. You can reach her at rmcguire@nsf.org.
This post is one in a series on managing the quality and food safety of a supply chain as a manufacturer, restaurant brand or foodservice company.
Sign Up to receive the latest supplier management news.
Learn more about NSF’s Supplier Management Services.
Last week I ripped apart an old deck. I convinced myself it wasn’t a big project, and shouldn’t take that long. Shortly into the demolition I knew I had grossly underestimated the amount of time needed to finish it. This was despite the fact that just two years ago I’d done a similar project, which surprise surprise, also took longer than expected. This is a simple example of “the planning fallacy” — a concept of Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman which says we tend to display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed to complete a project, even when we have experience with a similar task.
As humans our nature is to be optimistic, which is great because the alternative (pessimistic) would be a terrible way to live. However it does result in a general trend of overestimating our ability to complete projects and tasks on time or get them done at all. It’s also our nature not to disappoint, and we often need to promise a certain deadline to even get the initiative approved.
So our nature and a lot of norms in the corporate world have the deck stacked against us. Plus, many organizations run with a very lean food safety and quality assurance team, making the scope of responsibility for many quality assurance personnel sometimes impossibly broad and doomed to fail.
Think of a quality assurance professional who has both supply side and more direct operational responsibilities. This individual is responsible for vetting new suppliers, visiting supplier sites and ensuring suppliers continue to meet quality and safety expectations. This person may also be responsible for quality assurance in production (at a manufacturer) or at the restaurant level (in a foodservice organization) where often more immediate resolution is needed.
Even if one’s entire focus is on the supplier side, it is easy to get caught up in a reactionary mode. Complaints piling up, managing corrective actions, site visits to suppliers to address issues can suck up all our time. And despite our best intentions we fall behind on the more proactive projects that are intended to get us out of the more reactionary spiral.
Fortunately many organizations have realized the amount of effort required to manage the safety and quality of the supply chain. This has led to more strategic, integrated and systems-based approaches with support from functional areas across the organization. This is optimistic news for those who find themselves in organizations that haven’t adopted this philosophy. Here are a few tips to help you get started.
Depending on your organization you may not feel empowered to change things. Seek out someone who can support you, a senior sponsor somewhere in the company who will listen. There are plenty of reasons to get started. Talk in dollars saved (costs avoided), talk in risks — whatever it takes to get their attention.
Get started on a more strategic and proactive approach to supplier management as soon as possible. This great article, Uncomplicating the Supply Planning Process, suggests that if you’re overwhelmed with the task of supply planning, filter your suppliers down to the “significant few.” Rather than launching with your entire supplier base, start with a subset of the most important suppliers and build from there. Perhaps start with your largest suppliers by spend or with product categories generally deemed as higher risk. Starting with a small sample lets you test a process before scaling it up to the rest of the supply chain.
To keep pushing for that new head count, get a resource from another department to pitch in. Don’t be afraid to admit you can’t keep up with expectations. Finding some help can free you up to get started on a more systemic, structured approach that will lead to fewer headaches, and a safer supply chain.
Outsourcing can also make sense and you can incentivize the contract to increase the chances of the job being done on time (and on budget). A third party can boost your capacity in both expertise and horsepower and provide focus to a task that needs to get done but continually gets pushed aside as more immediate priorities pop up. To increase your confidence in finding a partner you can trust, get referrals for similar work completed. Learn more in this outsourcing article.
At the very least, know you’re not alone. Food safety and quality professionals, and pretty well every human alive, tends to bite off more than they can chew. Being at least aware of these general tendencies can help us plan a little bit better in all that we do and, if nothing else, make us feel less bad when we don’t get everything done.
Author:Scott Arnald works as a supervisor on the consulting team at NSF providing services that help companies manage the food safety and quality of their supply chain. You can reach him at sarnald@nsf.org.
This post is one in a series on managing the quality and food safety of a supply chain as a manufacturer, restaurant brand or foodservice company.
Sign Up to receive the latest supplier management news.
Learn more about NSF’s Supplier Management Services.
Approving new suppliers is often atop the list of the most common nonconformances, and anecdotally, nearly every company struggles with managing their suppliers. So, what’s the solution?
Download the article, Simplifying the Supplier Onboarding Process to learn more.
Originally published in Food Quality & Safety.
If you sell products into California, you need to be aware of Proposition 65, commonly known as Prop 65. Prop 65 was enacted as the Safe Drinking Water and Enforcement Act in 1986 to address concerns about consumer exposure to toxic chemicals. Prop 65 requires that the state of California published a list of chemicals (now over 900) that may cause cancer, birth defects or reproductive harm. The list includes additives, ingredients, or impurities that may be found in common household products, food, drugs, dyes, or solvents. They can also be chemicals used in manufacturing or byproducts of chemical processing. For businesses selling into California, the Prop 65 regulation requires warnings to be provided to citizens prior to exposure to any chemical found on the list.
Download the article, Proposition 65: How Does This Regulation Affect Food Packaging? to learn more.
Originally published in Food in Canada.
It is possible for meal kits to deliver an exciting unboxing experience for ecommerce food shoppers and do so using sustainably optimized packaging.
Download the article, Delivering sustainably optimized meal kit packaging, to learn more.
Originally published in Packaging Digest.
In mid-January, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) ushered in the new Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (SFCR), introducing licensing, preventive control, and traceability obligations for food preparation companies and importers. Over the coming 12 to 30 months, various requirements will be phased in slowly.
Download the article, Canada Ushers in New Food Safety Regulations, to learn more.
Originally published in Food Quality and Safety.
Effective supply planning can continually improve the management of suppliers to develop a more robust, safe and reliable supply base.
Download the article, Uncomplicating the Supply Planning Process, to learn more.
Originally published in Food Quality and Safety.
Learn more about NSF’s Supplier Management Services.
As many food companies rely more on computer systems for managing their businesses, understanding and planning for the threat of cybersecurity risks is paramount.
Download the article, Confronting Food Cyberterrorism, to learn more.
Originally published in Food Quality and Safety.
Companies need to establish a robust contract, open channels for communication and performance criteria.
Download the article, What Food Organizations Need to Know Before Outsourcing, to learn more.
Originally published in Food Quality and Safety.
Learn more about NSF’s Supplier Management Services.
