Fifteen years ago I landed a job as a food safety auditor with an international auditing body. Last year I decided to hang up my boots to pursue other avenues in food safety. During this time, I had seen well over 1500 food factories. I learnt a great deal about food safety, about best practices and...

Supplier Quality Assurance is an integral part of a Food Safety Management System. It includes how to select and approve suppliers and it stipulated what proof we need from them be it COAs/COCs, certification, reputation. It also focuses on what is required from packaging material suppliers, chemica...

When I present food safety training, I always note the job functions that attend. It off course, depends on the training course itself but in general I find that there would be only about 1 maintenance personnel for every 10 Quality and 10 Production personnel that attend. The explanation is always ...

In South Africa, we had numerous food safety incidents of Sudan Red, a carcinogenic industrial chemical being added to food. This occurred in 2005, 2007 and again in 2014. Then there was the saga of Melamine being added to milk powder in 2009. Now, the latest scare is that Cumin spice has been adult...

Consider this scenario: You work for a sauce manufacturing facility. Your company has several successful, well established bottled sauce brands .You have just had your annual staff performance appraisals. Two of the workers are very unhappy because they received poor wage increases and they were ove...

Q: We are dry flavour blending company. We are really struggling with our allergen management program. There are 8 legislated allergens and approximately 60 of our recipes have an allergen or combination of allergens. We only have 6 blenders to mix our products. We have tried to wet clean after alle...

Q: I’m the Quality Manager at a large food manufacturing facility. It get the feeling that top management doesn’t really see the importance of food safety. They see our department as just another overhead. Almost as a problem child that keeps wanting money. How can I make them understand the imp...

Q: I work for a large food processing company. Our biggest problem is birds.  We have tried everything to control this problem and nothing seems to work. What advice do you have for us? A: Birds are a major concern in food production and retail establishments. In my 15 years of food safety...

Q: We have heard that HACCP is going to be replaced with a new system called HARPC. Is this true? Is HACCP on its way out? A: HARPC is the acronym for Hazard Analysis and Risk Based Preventive Controls.  HARPC forms part of the United States of America’s new Food Safety Modernization Act...

Rolf Uys works for AIB International, a prominent, USA based food safety training and auditing company. He holds the position of Manager for Africa, Middle East and Europe. Rolf holds a MSc. In Food Science from Stellenbosch and has 15 years’ experience in Food Safety Auditing and Training. During...

Quality assurance advice (Q&A) In this column, Rolf Uys offers a service to readers by answering queries regarding practical advice to typical food safety questions. QUESTION: We train our employees every year on food safety. The Quality Department keeps on reinforcing food safety issu...