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Management of quality regulations with food management safety system
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Tuesday, 15 December, 2020, 13 : 00 PM [IST]
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Norina Fernandes
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Food safety management system is a systematic approach to controlling food safety hazards within a food business to assure that food is safe to eat. FSM systems such as HACCP, GHP and GMP have been developed over recent decades to provide the industry with excellent tools for the control of food safety. Food safety and quality has received attention in the agri-food sector and is the basis of all initiatives taken on different activity levels starting from farm to enterprises as a whole on regional, national, and international levels.
There are various standards that endorses conformity of services and products for international trading by assuring about reliability, food quality, and food safety such as British Retail Consortium, the Safe Quality Food (SQF) program- Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 22000, Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), FSSC Ver.5.0 etc.
Food and Beverage Quality regulations with FSMS ensure safe food supply throughout the chain and provide a framework of internationally harmonised systems for the global approach. It incorporates critical control point and hazard analysis systems in more improved form to produce much effective auditable FSMS.
According to Codex, food safety is to guarantee that food will not harm the consumer. To prevent food from being contaminated at any point of this from stable to table, from plow to plate, from farm to fork, from boat to throat, from till to tooth and from spring to drink continuum, the International Organisation for Standardisation published a standard that describes the requirements for FSMS and involves quality management systems specially focused on safe and good quality food.
Quality management systems suggested organizations to control and coordinate for quality by setting quality objectives and implementation of quality policy for food quality assurance with a system of continuous improvement.
The best known approaches to managing quality propounded by the quality masters such as Deming, Crosby, Juran, Ishikawa, Shingo, Taguchi and others started in the manufacturing sector. The tools and techniques used in manufacturing are well proven to be effective in these environments.
Increasingly, attention has been drawn to the service sector and the particular challenges faced by companies wishing to pursue service quality, but recognising that the challenges can be quite different. The quality matrix described earlier illustrates the problem facing food and beverage operations. Not only must these operations deal with the manufacturing problems of meal or drink production but they also have to act as a service operation.
It is not surprising that the resulting complexity makes managing quality in food and beverage operations a difficult but not impossible challenge.
Looking at the characteristics of service operations that are seen to distinguish them from manufacturing provides some interesting insights for food and beverage operations:
Heterogeneity: As service outputs are heterogeneous the standard of performance may vary, especially where there is a high labour content. It is therefore hard to ensure consistent quality from the same employee from day to day, and harder still to get comparability between employees, yet this will crucially affect what the customer receives. While a customer may expect some variability in the service received, the same cannot be true of the product dimension.
Intangibility: Unlike a ‘pure ’service operation, food and beverage operations do not simply consist of the service performance and the intangible factors that affect this interaction. A large part of their hospitality consists of the very tangible product elements of food and drink. On the product side there are the tangible elements of the food or drink itself – Touch, Taste, Appearance.
Perishability: Services cannot be stored, and so the buffer of an inventory that can be used to cope with fluctuations in customer demand is removed. Even a restaurant seat is a perishable product. Empty places cannot be stockpiled for a busy day sometime in the future.
Simultaneity: The production and consumption of many services are simultaneous, for example having a haircut or taking a plane flight. Most services then cannot be counted, measured, inspected, tested or verified before sale for subsequent delivery to the customer. The product element of hospitality ranges from simultaneous production – for gueridon service, where cooking is done in the restaurant at the table – to decoupled production – for cook-chill or cook-freeze, where food is batch produced at a central location, cooled and then distributed for later consumption – with many other possible systems in between.
The key elements of a successful food management system are:
1. Policy and commitment
2. Planning
3. Implementation and operation
4. Measuring performance
FSMS includes Quality First: The control approach still centers on inspection and recognizes the need for a detailed specification and that quality checks should be made throughout the production process. Quality control will not improve product or service quality, it will only highlight when it has gone wrong.
A nonconforming product or service must be produced before action can be taken to put it right and this leads to inefficiency and waste. The focus has switched for the staff into finding others to blame for the defects to avoid the ‘disciplinary’ action taken against those who make mistakes.
FSMS provides Quality assurance which recognises the inefficiencies of waiting for mistakes to happen and strives to design quality into the process so that things cannot go wrong or if they do they are identified and corrected as they happen.
Lasting and continuous improvement in quality can best be achieved through planning and preventing problems from arising at source. Moving the emphasis from inspection to prevention is helped by the introduction of a number of quality assurance tools and techniques such as SPC, blueprinting and quality costing.
(The author is senior quality assurance executive (F&B) at Café Coffee Day Global, Mumbai. She can be contacted at norinafernz1004@gmail.com)
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