QA is not just about food safety, it is a critical part of risk management. The role of the business owner.
The role of the owner (Continued from last month)
The most important part of any QA system is the business owner or, in the case of a large business, the Board.
There will be examples of owners who are fully behind the QA process and personally drive the ethos, although they delegate the work.
However, I have seen time and again what some owners never seem to understand—if you don’t get behind QA, or OH&S, or whatever, then why should any employee get behind it?
Furthermore, the person who tends to undermine control systems more than anyone else is the owner—he or she has the power to make the rules, and to break them.
Yes, it is the owner’s business; and yes, the owner is the most important person in the business, because he or she sets the tone for everything the business does.
Conclusion
Large customers are pushing the responsibility for QA back on producers.
They expect each business to develop a QA team which gains knowledge and expertise sufficient to ensure that risk is minimised along the supply chain.
The very real examples of contaminated food will only reinforce their view that each part of the chain has to be managed very well so that the interests and safety of consumers are protected.
But QA systems have the potential to offer so much more, especially as they have to be applied anyway.
They provide the opportunity to drive or reinforce an ethos of personal and process quality in a business, no matter its stage of development and they offer a way of managing things that can be controlled throughout the whole year, not just at audit time.
See this article in Tree Fruit August 2016
