If you are a food manufacturing facility, you may be worried right now over the recent recalls across the country for E. coli concerns. Food recalls can impact your business and ultimately your bottom line.

Companies are faced with the costly consequences of manufacturing a product that is being pulled off the market, not to mention the backlash of negative press and the fear of consumers to consume these type of products. Whether, or not you are currently involved in these recalls, or are on high alert of this happening, do you know what steps are required to prevent another food recall from happening?

It's vital to take precautions now to ensure you avoid a repeated recall or avoid a potential recall. Here are three best practices to help your manufacturing facility to overcome the food safety challenges that can lead to harmful and costly recalls. Implement, train and document.

1. Implement a compliant food safety plan

With the implementation of the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (implemented in January 2019) it's imperative to ensure that everyone's food is safe. As you enhance your contamination identifications efforts, you're likely to find more actual contamination in testing samples. However, while this may seem counter intuitive, finding more contamination is actually a good thing. In fact, this will allow your business to respond more quickly to food safety issues and get in front of the problem before a recall damages your brand.

• Developing and executing an effective and compliant food safety plan involves some of following components:
• Initiating comprehensive, prevention-based controls across the food supply to prevent or significantly minimize the likelihood of problems occurring.
• Instituting a verification process to ensure that foreign domestic suppliers have adequate preventive controls in place.
• Designing a well-communicated voluntary recall response plan for your organization
• Maintaining organized, accessible and up-to-date documentation on testing results and corrective actions
• Adopting visibility and communication tools to meet unfolding regulations and enable a strong food safety culture

2. Properly train all employees

Preventing recalls requires a strong plan for education and training. If you are going to keep your food plant cleaning in house, ensure you have a designated team or individual to oversee this function. Food safety cannot or will not happen in a silo. Every employee from the top to the bottom has to play an important role in keep food safe. Everyone has to be trained on effective implementation, and receive proper education and training. It's better to be proactive and help to avoid the threat of a recall.

Create a strong culture on food safety. Help to minimize recall effects, with ongoing awareness and education. Prepare your time change their mindset that is required in the ever evolving food safety commitment. Plan for a strong strategy, with education and training across the entire company.

3. Document your efforts

Documentation is everything. It is mandatory to have a dynamic documentation process in place. Food safety cannot be achieved without standardized, documented and shareable process that safeguard against contamination and the onset of food-bourne illness. You must ensure you have a process for collecting and utilizing detailed, efficient, accessible documentation.

Do You Need a Food Safety Partner?

MWAC can be your food safety partner. We take food safety and protecting YOUR brand and YOUR customers seriously. Our dedicated and trained team work along-side the owners and are committed to ensuring YOUR production floor is a safe wholesome environment; we guarantee on-time delivery.

With over 50 years in the Commercial Food Plant Sanitation Industry, our business is built on our reputation of quality service and we are proud of the fact that we have grown, fundamentally through referrals. Our experiences are diverse, with a portfolio of experiences ranging from food plant sanitation, janitorial services, supermarkets, retail, commercial, industrial warehousing and office cleaning.