Hindsight is 20/20. But when regulatory compliance and your consumer's safety are on the line, you can't settle for reactionary food safety tactics. By staying aware of potential threats, your team can work proactively to build a stronger food safety plan that addresses your facility's unique weaknesses.
The best way to uncover where your issues are hiding before they transform into food safety incidents? Put your facility to the test with regular internal audits as an early warning system. Rather than waiting for regulators to discover your vulnerabilities when it will cost you most, internal food safety audits allow you to identify and address them ahead of time, taking your fate into your own hands.
Follow along as we break down the importance and benefits of this proactive prevention method — and why investing in outside expertise can take your food safety efforts to the next level.
You can't defend against what you don’t know — and this is particularly true in food safety. Unaddressed vulnerabilities can lead to significant food safety failures, and reacting to these failures after the fact may be too late. That's why establishing an early warning system is essential.
If, for example, your team is unwittingly misinterpreting certain standard operating procedures (SOPs) surrounding allergen controls, they’ll likely make operational mistakes that lead to allergen cross-contact. This non-compliance can cascade into a series of legal, regulatory, and financial consequences stemming from food safety blind spots.
Periodic internal audits are a valuable tool for identifying and rectifying these mistakes. By staying in the know about potential cracks in your operation, your team can address them quickly and effectively before they create headaches for your business.
Proactive prevention is crucial to ensuring food safety slip-ups don't cause irreversible damage to your consumers’ health and your business's reputation. So how do you stay ahead of the game in preventing food safety incidents? By regularly checking in on your operations.
Performing regular internal food safety audits offers a few key benefits, each of which can enable a better overall approach to food safety.
Performing regular internal audits allows you to keep a pulse on where your current food safety plan falls short — as well as where it's succeeding. As they review audit results, your team can identify areas for food safety improvement and fill gaps in protocols. This could include shortcomings in areas such as:
Food safety training
Employee comprehension
Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
Documentation and recordkeeping
Traceability
Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) execution
Food safety compliance requirements — including Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) requirements and GFSI-recognized schemes
Keeping tabs on potential risk areas and procedural deficits allows you to make active changes to your training, food safety plan, and risk controls to minimize these issues and elevate your existing food safety methods.
Taking preventive action against potential food safety risks starts with knowing what needs to be fixed. Internal audits allow you to move through your operational processes step by step to identify even the smallest errors that could lead to preventable mistakes.
For example, you may review your internal sanitation procedures and discover that your team isn’t allowing adequate contact time between spraying sanitizer on surfaces and wiping it away. Since sanitizer requires specific dwell time to kill dangerous pathogens, this gap in protocols could lead to food safety failures like bacterial outbreaks and contaminated products. With consistent check-ins, you can pinpoint problem areas like this one, document your findings, and take corrective action to update your sanitation practices before an outbreak occurs.
As you identify risks in your operations, ensure the corrective actions you take align with your food safety plan and the expectations of your applicable food safety schemes. This will help you ensure your documentation and SOPs meet the standards required for compliance.
Regular audits also keep your team on their toes. This is essential for maintaining the food safety standards you expect day-to-day — not just when it comes time for an official inspection. Sharing the results of your internal audits with employees can help your team adjust behaviors and be more conscientious about where their attention is required, where they can do better, and whether procedures are being performed as expected.
Not only is this beneficial for driving results, but it's also important for supporting your food safety culture. Employees who are attuned to what is and isn't correct in their daily workflows will be more empowered to report potential vulnerabilities before they become food safety failures.
Inspection time is the worst time to find out about a non-compliance. Creating an early-warning system through internal audits helps you flag errors that could jeopardize your company’s food safety compliance. Regular testing reduces the time between check-ins, drives employee preparedness, and offers cushion time to fix issues before they are discovered by an official inspector.
Think of it this way: Internal audits act as a study guide for your big test — an official inspection. Internal audits help you determine which answers you already have right and which concepts need a refresher to ensure a passing grade come exam time.
You can also tailor your internal audits to address specific upcoming FDA inspections or audits for different food safety schemes, or even create a schedule so you're always cycling through applicable schemes for a more continuous approach to internal reviews.
By cross-referencing your current operations with the standards and practices of different food schemes, you can create a more comprehensive warning system that covers your bases against a wider range of international food safety expectations.
While you can take your internal audit process into your own hands, an outside perspective can sometimes identify issues that might otherwise go unnoticed by your team due to internal audit gaps.
After all, your team knows the ins and outs of your facility, but while this familiarity provides indispensable contextual knowledge of your operations, it can also introduce bias that creates blind spots and obscures potential issues or vulnerabilities. What may seem like "just another quirk of the job" to a veteran employee could, in the eyes of an outside expert, prove to be a food safety incident waiting to happen.
Third-party experts offer a fresh, objective perspective on your food safety operations, leveraging specialized industry experience to perform a food safety audit that examines your operations through a unique lens.
For instance, a food defense expert may identify vulnerabilities specific to intentional adulteration efforts — such as subpar physical security measures or lackluster food defense training. Meanwhile, a labeling expert could help you identify if you are mislabeling allergens or making other common packaging mistakes.
Expert-led audits provide specific, additional insights into your operations that will help your team generate better, more actionable results and approach inspections with confidence.
An early-warning system can help prevent unknown issues from growing into inescapable headaches, and internal audits are a crucial part of that system. But before you start implementing internal food safety audits, make sure you have a clear strategy in place and that you assign the right people to the job.
To bolster your internal audit process with a fresh and specialized perspective, consider partnering with an expert from AIB International to serve as a second set of eyes during your internal reviews. These experts can partner with your leadership team to strengthen food safety systems, elevate operational performance, and help prevent failures before they occur.