Food safety issues dominate the news these days with frequent product recalls by many major manufacturers because of safety inadequacies vis-à-vis these products. In house QC facilities in food industry are supposed to be strong, especially when it comes to reputed and large scale manufacturers but out-sourcing of analytical job is also common in countries like the US where sophisticated analytical companies are working to provide the required services. Taking a few samples and analyzing them in a reputed laboratory cannot pass of as a QC protocol and there has to be monitoring of the raw material sourcing as well as process control at every stage to ensure uniform quality of end product. Even for a large manufacturer monitoring of raw material sources coming from thousands of kilometers away can be a daunting task and this is where third party assistance is sought to inspect facilities and handling protocols at the suppliers' end to get a reasonable assurance that safety protocols are strictly adhered to. This is crucial because many food tainting cases are traced to ingredient suppliers' end eventually. Third party auditing has evolved over a period of time because of lack of confidence on the food inspection efficiency of the regulatory agencies but whether they are really doing a better job is an issue under the scanner to day.
"The company, AIB International, lists five standards on its website that inspectors expect to see in a "facility that maintains a food-safe processing environment." They are: ensuring that raw materials are safely stored and handled; equipment, buildings and grounds are properly maintained; cleaning and sanitizing is adequate; pests monitored and managed; and staffers are working together to deliver a safe final product. When FDA inspectors actually went into Wright County's henhouses at its Galt, Iowa, plant, they found vermin, filthy dead chickens and manure oozing out of doorways. More than 1,600 people were sickened in a salmonella enteritidis outbreak linked to the farm, and over 550 million eggs were recalled due to contamination at this plant and at nearby Hillandale Farms, where lesser problems were found. Brian Soddy, AIB International vice president of marketing and sales, notes that Wright County Egg only contracted with his company to inspect its egg-grading and sorting facilities, and not the henhouses. He declined to answer whether his auditors noticed anything amiss in another part of the farm and if they would have felt it necessary, or appropriate, to notify the company if they had. The audit firms are necessary, in part, because a lot of food manufacturers "don't believe that the regulatory agencies are doing the type of job they should be doing," says Charles Cook, who founded and then sold the third-party audit firm NSF Cook & Thurber. He now runs a small firm called Country Fare Consulting in San Clemente, Calif".
Many of the recent food infection episodes originated with manufacturers who relied on reputed third party auditing organizations and this calls for a review of the system to identify the underlying reasons. One of the startling facts which emerged recently is that the inspectors from the third party auditing agencies visiting the supplier facilities are "paid and entertained" by the suppliers, raising questions regarding conflict of interest. Even if the services are paid for by the buyers, visiting inspectors invariably are well "looked after" by the suppliers during their visits and it is a matter of speculation whether such a situation can create an "obligation" for the inspecting personnel to file a "favorable" report, contrary to ground realities. Probably the human weakness for materialistic comforts will remain for ever, causing such distortions in any well designed and established systems from time to time.
V.H.POTTY
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