Nvolve Customer Connect Summit - BRCGS Food Safety Issue 9
We were joined by Angela O’Donovan, Head of Standards, BRCGS and Richa Bedi-Navik, Global Head of Standards, BRCGS on our Customer Connect Summit 2023. Nvolve are partners with BRCGS and it was great to have them speaking on our Customer Connect Summit.
Angela firstly brought us through some of the history of BRCGS. We then moved on to the Food Standard Status Review. Angela went through the influences for updating the Food safety standards. It’s essential that the standard is up to date and relevant to the needs of the companies. The food safety standards is written by the Industry. BRCGS select a working group made up of people from food manufacturing, retailers, certification bodies, independent technical experts and more.
The focus of attention for Food Safety 9 was mainly on product safety and culture, codex general principles of food hygiene, expanding the audit options to include ICT, core product safety activities, animal primary conversion and producing animal feed.
Angela discusses the scope the standard sets out with regard to the requirements for the manufacture,
processing and packing of various products.
We are then brought through the most common non-conformities. There is a repeat trend of the same non-conformities year after year. We have a table outlining the Issue 8 non-conformities which have been the most common, mostly falling under section 4 of the standard.
If you enhance your basic fundamental controls you are likely to reduce these non-conformances. The controls that Issue 9 have thoroughly focused on are outlined on this slide. Concepts such as internal audits, root cause analysis, risk assessment etc. are part of these.
We are then given a top level overview of the key changes to requirements from Food Issue 8 to Food Issue 9. The most significant change surrounds the audits. They have now introduced ‘Blended Audits’ this will maximise the effectiveness of the time spent on the site. The second big change is that they have introduced also ‘Unannounced Audits’ which will happen once every 3 years.
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