From food safety to labelling regulations and traceability, it can be difficult for businesses to keep up with the food industry’s ever-changing legal requirements. But having a strong compliance management approach in place can make sure your business can plan, organise, lead, and control the activities that ensure industry compliance.
So, to understand the what, when and how of compliance management, let’s delve into the key considerations and challenges associated with it.
Compliance management seems complex, but the concept can be simplified by breaking it down into the following components:
A culture of compliance requires support and commitment at the highest level, so business owners and managers must do the following:
Compliance programmes should include the policies, procedures, and standards that should be followed across all your business activities. A key part of this is designating particular individuals or departments for monitoring compliance, specifying reporting responsibilities and identifying any necessary improvements.
Since each employee has a role to play in compliance, training forms part of the programme. For example, production line personnel must be trained on how to uphold food safety laws and where to escalate compliance-related concerns. Similarly, managers should also be trained to oversee compliance efforts and effectively identify and manage risks.
Compliance officers and managers must have the necessary skills to develop policies and procedures that ensure laws and regulations are followed. They also need to understand why certain policies are required and how they affect routine work.
When new regulations come into effect, compliance managers must assess them and decide what actions or decisions are required. As part of this, they conduct supply chain audits to verify supplier compliance and initiate any necessary corrective actions.
Internal compliance audits afford food businesses an opportunity to review activities and address risks. The higher the level of risk, the more frequently audits should be conducted. The nature of the products, the complexity of processing, and the number of affected consumers all impact risk. Audits should be scheduled at least once a year, and some businesses, for example, those who manufacture processed meat products, will perform them more frequently.
Audits begin with an evaluation of policies and procedures and a review of records. These include training records and standard operational procedures and reports. Compliance standards and reports are carefully studied, and findings are recorded and reported to top management along with any recommendations for improvement. These are evaluated, and changes are implemented and followed up as needed.
Legal and regulatory compliance is crucial in any line of business but in the food industry, it's particularly critical to the health and safety of customers as well as brand reputation. Food safety and quality are basic requirements, and many of the laws food businesses must follow were passed to protect public health. For example, effective allergen management and guarding against contamination can save lives.
While non-compliance in certain industries could result in little more than fines and penalties, it can have much more serious consequences in the food industry. Aside from avoiding the legal consequences of non-compliance, good compliance management fosters customer trust and protects your business’ reputation while reducing the risk of product recalls.
Food businesses face an array of unique challenges when navigating regulatory compliance, but there are actionable solutions. In this section, we will consider compliance challenges before examining the practices that will help you to overcome them.
Food manufacturers, retailers and service providers operate in a complex legal environment. The regulatory requirements for a single product can span several laws and sets of regulations. For example, if you are producing a meat-based product, it must comply with a multitude of regulations such as the Food Safety Act, the Animal Welfare Act and traceability and sustainability requirements. Packaging must also comply with a range of regulatory requirements, with examples relating to food composition and labelling to nutrition, health claims and food composition.
Supply chain traceability and transparency are crucial for compliance. The classic farm-to-fork approach may sound straightforward, but industry professionals understand the intricacies of tracing multiple ingredients all the way back to their source. Often, ingredients change hands several times before they are processed, and at every step, compliance must be verified.
With public health and business reputations at stake, vigilance is a continuous responsibility. Apart from monitoring supply chains, food businesses must oversee their own daily activities, keeping detailed and meticulous records to show they’ve met the necessary standards. At its best, this constant attention to regulatory compliance can prevent incidents that would otherwise lead to substandard or dangerous products reaching the market.
Compliance management depends on vast data sets, from supply chain information to laboratory analysis results and data collected during processing. Data must be gathered, analysed, interpreted and stored, and the data format as well as its security add to the challenges of compliance management. In addition, data must be shared as evidence of compliance, so while data should be secure, it should also be well-organised, accessible and transferrable.
Foods Connected helps you to manage compliance across your supply chain including real-time data for traceability, templates for risk assessments, food safety audits and data-driven performance tracking. We can also help you to monitor important internal activities like HACCP management and document control. Talk to us about your needs. We’ll help you select the compliance management tools you need to make compliance management simpler yet more effective than ever before.
To find out more about our safety, quality and compliance software, request a demo today.