Third party food safety audits are like mail-order diplomas
Mansour, I couldn’t have said it better myself:
“The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education,” said Mansour Samadpour, a Seattle consultant who has worked with companies nationwide to improve food safety.
The Ponzi scheme that is third-party food safety audits is starting to collapse. Watching Jon Stewart on the Daily Show last night, the questions he asked to a N.Y. Times reporter about the financial mess could have easily been mapped to the food safety mess (see video below).
The N.Y. Times will report in tomorrow’s editions that the American Institute of Baking auditor who gave the Peanut Corporation of America plant in Georgia a superior rating before the peanut-salmonella shitstorm, was an expert in fresh produce and was not aware that peanuts were readily susceptible to salmonella poisoning — which he was not required to test for anyway. Oh, and PCA paid for the audit which Kelloog’s then blindly accepted.
The auditor even wrote in a Jan. 20 e-mail after the salmonella outbreak became public, that, “I never thought that this bacteria would survive in the peanut butter type environment. What the heck is going on??”
That’s why there’s FSnet and barfblog and hundreds of other food safety resources out there; he never heard of Peter Pan and salmonella in 2007?
In 2007, Keystone Foods, the Pennsylvania plant that makes Veggie Booty, received an “excellent” rating from the American Institute of Baking. But the audit did not extend to ingredient suppliers, including a New Jersey company whose imported spices from China were tainted with salmonella.
“The only thing that matters is productivity,” said Robert A. LaBudde, a food safety expert who has consulted with food companies for 30 years, adding that “you only get in trouble if someone in the media traces it back to you, and that’s rare, like a meteor strike.”
Dr. LaBudde said a sausage plant hired him five years ago to determine the species of bacillus plaguing its meat. But the owner then refused to complete the testing. “I called them ‘anthrax sausages,’ and said they could be killing older people in the state, and still they wouldn’t do it,” he said, declining to name the company. ...
Before the salmonella outbreak, Costco had rebuffed repeated proposals by the organization to inspect all its food suppliers. “The American Institute of Baking is bakery experts,” said R. Craig Wilson, the top food safety official at Costco. “But you stick them in a peanut butter plant or in a beef plant, they are stuffed.”
Costco, Kraft Foods and Darden Restaurants are among a group of food manufacturers and other companies that use detailed plans to prevent food safety hazards. They also supplement third-party audits with their own inspections and testing of ingredients and plant surfaces for microbes.
http://barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/admin/trackback/116777
Doug,
It's true some audits are more intense then others but, these auditors only get to see what the auditee wants them to see. Often these audit dates are arranged months in advance. That's plenty of time to "clean up" before company comes.
Is it really fair to pick on AIB? I would bet that several other third party and customer audits were performed on those facilities. Why focus on AIB?
Doug,
So, what's a better system?
My personal experience has been that it doesn't matter who the auditor is from AIB, Silliker, NSF, Costco, Darden, FDA, Military it's the knowledge that the individual doing the audit brings that is critical.
I would like to see FDA come out with a hazards guide that would be updated with every confirmed outbreak so the specific identified hazards could be added to the standards but right now most audits are still basically GMP/SOP based not risk based and that includes goverment as well as 3rd party and customer audits.
ken
Another problem with 3rd party audits is that they have become commoditized. Audit firms, from large companies to one person outfits, have continuously cut rates to the point where you have auditors who routinely operate out of their depth. The checklists have been dumbed down to allow for one day visits for the sake of convenience to the client.
Doug,
Yes, third party audits are routinely misrepresented as an indicator of the state of a food company's food safety program but the problem is really has been the lack of a single source of information for a small to medium company to build the quality control system. It normally takes thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars to build a complete system and most companies do not have the the time, money or knowledge to do it. Even food science students are not taught how to develop a quality system replete with all of the requisite sub-programs. This is why CRC press just published the book Food Industry Quality Control Systems. It is a primer for small to medium food companies that also contains a CD in the back that has all the forms and program documents customizable for each company.