How to become an auditor - SQF

A few months ago I posted a 'how to' guide for becoming an auditor. Here's some additional help, specifically around the SQF standard.

How to Become a SQF Auditor http://www.sqfi.com/checklist_auditorreg.html

1. Background Experience

• For each Food Sector Category (FSC) that is requested for registration, applicants must demonstrate 5 years work experience in food safety and/or quality management within the requested FSC, or 120/160 (for high risk FSC) audit hours within requested FSC, or a combination of work experience and audit experience for each FSC requested
• Must have completed at least 160 hours of food safety and/or quality auditing in the food industry (20 audit days)
• Must have at least 5 years work experience in food safety, HACCP program management and/or quality systems management within the food industry

2. Training

• Must attend and successfully complete the SQF Auditor Course - Auditing SQF Systems, taught by SQFI or a designee, and successfully complete the online SQF Auditor Exam
• Must attend an independent objective Auditor Training course of at least 8 hours in length (i.e. ASQ or RABQSA)
• Must attend a HACCP Training course with certificate issued

3. Apply to SQF

• Must be employed by or contracted to an SQF licensed Certification Body
• Signed Auditor Sponsor Verification Form
• Certificates for:
• Education documents (i.e. diploma, continuing education or short course certificates, etc.)
• HACCP Training
• SQF Systems Training - Auditing of SQF Systems (Certificate of Attendance and Attainment)
• Auditor training certificate (i.e. ASQ or RABQSA certificate)
• Industry Experience and Food Sector Category Log
• Audit Log

4. Fees

Refer to the below link for application fees

http://www.sqfi.com/application_fees.html

Walmart Announces New Food Safety Audit Requirements

Walmart & Sam’s Club rolled out a Produce Safety Initiative on November 30 to all suppliers worldwide.

This will all affect produce suppliers who supply to Walmart & Sam's Club.

For the announcement official announcements please see the below links.

National Suppliers Roll Out Requirement
National Suppliers Audit Requirement
Small Producers Roll Out Requirement
Small Producers Audit Requirement

NCSI Americas is pleased to be named as one of the approved Certification Bodies for the GAP program. Please contact us if we can help you meet any of your GAP obligations.

NCSI Americas making training more accessible to your organization.

For 2011 we’re pleased to announce our most recent initiative – a single low cost for training that covers your access to any training course ran by NCSI Americas, including HACCP, GlobalGAP, BRC, SQF and Internal Auditor Training.

One low annual cost

Any staff member (up to three per course)

Attend as many training courses ran by NCSI Americas as you need

The cost? US$1500 per year to meet all of your training needs.

Food Safety Training courses typically cost around $500 per course, per person, so we're excited at the substantial savings this program will bring in meeting your training requirements.

So give us a call or send us an email.

1 877 285 6554

info@ncsiamericas.com

www.ncsiamericas.com

Inhouse training classes and Lead Auditor Training, are excluded from this program.

NQA West Coast Quality Conference

Wednesday, January 26, 2011 ‐ Los Angeles, CA

NQA is bringing its expertise to LA with a one‐day quality conference covering the hottest issues in process and product compliance. Industry and auditing veterans will provide the insight you need to help your company achieve success. Attend this complimentary event to experience the quality and expertise that NQA offers its clients as an innovative solution provider in the management systems certification industry.

NCSI Americas, as a partner of NQA, is heading up a 90 minute presentation titled 'The True Cost of Food Safety: Choosing a GFSI Food Safety Certification'.

For any questions about the conference please contact NCSI Americas - we'd love to see you there!

30th Annual NW Food Safety and Sanitation Workshop and Exhibit Show

The 30th Annual NW Food Safety and Sanitation Workshop and Exhibit Show is about to kick off on November 9 – 10, 2010 at the Sheraton Portland Airport Hotel in the Mt. Hood Ballroom.

It promises to be another great turnout of Northwest food processing sanitation specialists.\

NCSI Americas are proud to be a sponsor and would love to see you drop by our booth at number 19-20. We hope to see you there!

NCSI Americas delivers first two pilot audits for the Harmonized Standard

The Harmonized standard effort has received a major kick along, with NCSI Americas recently delivering the first two audits against this standard.

With the standard currently in a published draft form, United Fresh has been pushing for pilot audits to be conducted against volunteer organizations. Bluebird, a growing and packing operation in Washington state, has been kind enough to volunteer two of their sites for the pilot audits to go ahead.

The audits proceeded smoothly, and several areas for improvement in the GAP standard have been identified.

Ideally now other certification bodies and produce organizations will also help in piloting the standard.

The Harmonized GAP standard is a combined industry effort to merge all existing produce standards into one, making it easily accessible and accepted by the USDA and all retailers.

United Fresh Harmonization Standard Effort Nears Completion

The effort spear-headed by United Fresh to create a unified and harmonized GAP standard is drawing to a close, after the Technical Working Group completed both the pre-farm gate, and post-farm gate sections of the standard on October 22, 2010.

This signifies the end of the regular monthly working meetings to compile the standards, and efforts will now shift to piloting the standard and working out a framework for the standard to be managed.

NCSI Americas, in association with Costco and the Washington Horticultural Association, was the first organization to pilot the standard at a pre-farm gate level. This pilot was conducted October 15, 2010, on one of Bluebird Inc. orchards. Having previously gone through a GlobalGAP audit the week before, the site was well prepared and the audit went very smoothly. Several recommendations have been made to alter the standard.

NCSI Americas is also pleased to announce, in association with Costco and the Washington Horticultural Association, that an additional pilot of the standard will be ran of the post-farm gate section at one of Bluebird's packing facilities. The pilot is planned to run November 5, 2010 and will be led by Brett Holman.

Our thanks go out to everyone involved in the process, and especially to Larry Blakely at Bluebird for allowing us to test the standard out with them multiple times.

Full details will be available shortly, courtesy of United Fresh.

The True Cost Of Food Safety Certification

"Food Safety is a direct cost to your bottom line."

Sound familiar?

Under no circumstances would I try and convince anyone that committing to Food Safety is an inexpensive operation. It's fraught with cost, including time. How much time, and how much money does it cost?

Well that's going to depend on your organization. You generally want to allow up to 6 months to prepare if you intend to do everything in-house, and someone will need to be spending at least half their time on food safety.

But what about the cost of not doing food safety?

As retailers look to minimize their exposure by ensuring that their suppliers meet a benchmarked standard, we've seen companies that have adopted food safety certification move to the forefront of the marketplace, gaining market share as they've found more markets to sell into. Put simply, food safety certification is not necessarily just all a cost - but can add real value to your business.

That point aside - what if a food safety issue does occur? Food Safety hones your organizations recall procedures, and ensures that any food safety issue is recalled off the market in a timely manner - minimizing company financial exposure and physical exposure from consumers.

Food Safety has a number of preventative measures as well, inherent in Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP's). After all, if your organization is involved in a recall, no doubt that will cost money - but how much more will it cost the entire industry as consumers change their shopping habits away from the affected products?

In competitive markets, can organizations afford not to embrace food safety, and an top of that, the means to verify the food safety system is in effect through certification? The cost of not adopting food safety is one that is far too great a cost for the industry to bare.

Now that I've successfully scared people reading this, let's look on the bright side. By adopting Food Safety, organizations are embracing a pro-active approach to reduce costs in the long run, by minimizing food safety related recalls and guaranteeing markets to sell to.

NCSI Americas To Begin To Offer PrimusGFS Certification

PrimusGFS is a scored style audit, which has definite appeal to many food safety managers in the marketplace. NCSI Americas is pleased to announce that it will become only the second Certification Body to be able to offer this standard.

This will help provide competition in the marketplace for this standard, and we're excited to be able to offer it.

Previously, companies had to go through PrimusLabs for this standard.

How To Become An Auditor

Many people are interested in becoming a management systems auditor, and we have many that approach us everyday. It's an entirely good thing as there is a shortage of auditors in the industry.

The problem is that not every person interested in auditing has the background that would be accepted by standards owners. A minimum of 5 years is preferred in your relevant industry before you are able to audit in that area. This ensures that the auditors being used have a detailed working knowledge of their industry and know what to look for. There's no point an auditor coming from the apple industry, and being asked to audit a factory making bottle water.

Once it has been established that you possess the relevant background work experience, the training to become an auditor can take up to 12 months to complete. This is an incredible expense for any business to wear.

How To Become An Auditor

1. Have background experience in a relevant industry

2. Do some training - HACCP training, SQF training, BRC training etc. Make yourself employable as an auditor by showing some interest in the subject

3. Do a lead-auditor course (either BRC or RAB-QSA) - this is an approx. 4 day course that trains a prospective auditor in a range of different areas

4. Contact a Certification Body with these details in hand - if you can show you have done the training already, it's much more likely a Certification Body will be willing to perform the shadow audits, submit the paperwork to the standards owners, and give a sign off.

And with those 4 things done, I would be very confident that any Certification Body would be happy to take you on board.

Food Safety – Here To Stay.

One thing that continually baffles me when I speak with people who talk to me about Food Safety Certification is their willingness to put their heads in the sand, and hope it all goes away.

For better or for worse, it is here to stay. And it’s growing at an ever increasing rate, reaching right down to the farm level. Pretending it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t affect you, or that you will be able to continue to find markets for your produce without a Food Safety System is an erroneous belief. This has been evidenced in Washington State, where the smaller businesses who ‘couldn’t afford’ food safety certification (for a farm, priced around $1400 per year in audit costs) have been driven to the wall, and either gone out of business, or been acquired by businesses who have adopted certification and have grown as a result.

Those companies still yet to embrace it face an ever shrinking demand for their products as brokers, packhouses, and plants find it more difficult to comply with buyer requests for food safety certificates.

Let’s take the humble apple as our case study - a fruit that ranks as one of the lowest risk products on the market (when sold whole). The question often posed is 'why adopt a food safety certification when food safety is not an issue?' It’s a valid question. The reason here is that major retailers and supermarkets have issued a blanket, across every industry a requirement to be certified.

Why not make low risk products exempt, then? Because the costs of administrating these exemptions, and the risk of people exploiting any loophole, are too high. It’s much simpler for the major retailers and supermarkets to make it an across the board requirement.

Certification As A Method Of Making Money.

The businesses that do adopt food certification have a much stronger chance of remaining competitive against imported produce, which is often not certified. It broadens your markets, and stops your purchasers from going elsewhere.

In these times any cost that does not impact on revenue positively is one that producers can not afford. Food Safety Certification is viewed in this light. But with markets squeezing, Food Safety Certification is increasingly viewed as being revenue positive – i.e. it generates more money than it costs – because it guarantees a market.

And to make the process even easier, organizations do exist to help. One such organization in Washington State is GRAS2P – the growers response to food safety. GRAS2P is part of the Washington Horticultural Association. For a fee they will provide you with training, and all the documents required. They will then take you through to Certification – making the entire process simple, and cost effective.

Certification Isn't That Expensive...

Ahem, before people start throwing rocks at me, let me qualify that statement somewhat. Certification isn't that expensive, at least not in comparison with the costs involved in having a designated member of staff (or more, depending on the size and scope of your operations) responsible for maintaining and overseeing a management system.

In some large operations, it can be a team of people. In smaller to mid-sized firms, it can often be someone already juggling other duties, and always does seem to fall with the person already responsible for Quality Assurance (not necessarily a bad thing - they do know production extremely well).

Compared to these costs, the certification service itself is cheap. Whenever companies approach certification for the first time, this is one thing we always warn them about - the money you pay for certification will not be your major expense, but rather, your highest costs will be with staff time.

The other major point to consider is will certification mean your business will be able to grow on to bigger and better things? A GFSI benchmarked certification (usually SQF or BRC) is usually necessary to trade with the major retailers these days, such as Wal-Mart, Costco or any of the local chains. Will the costs of certification (and all the associated indirect costs of peoples time) be outweighed by the value of having a larger market to sell to?

That's not a question we can answer for you, but it is a question we ask our clients all the time - will being certified help you remain competitive, attract new clients, and increase revenue?

Harmonization

There have been several discussions over the years on developing a comprehensive standard that will cover all requirements from a certification point of view. Surprisingly, there has been very little forward momentum in Europe and Asia/Pacific.

However, the movement afoot in North America, being led by United Fresh, seems to have gained significant ground. For those not familiar with Harmonization effort, it seeks to reconcile various GAP standards into a single applicable standard, that will be acceptable to everyone. In theory, this will replace such standards as GlobalGAP, SQF 1000, Tesco to name a few.

The goal for the Harmonization standard is for a draft to be completed around October. It would then be presented to various stakeholders to gain approval.

While the concept is a good one, some are skeptical of any potential for success. The retailer standards, for example Tesco, have been notorious for insisting upon their own standard, and their own standard only.

Where retailers are a little more open to a variety of standards however, this should gain rapid recognition - after all, it's combining a number of separate standards into one 'super' standard, so to speak.

GLOBALG.A.P Benchmarked

The Global Food Safety Initiative is pleased to announce the alignment of the food safety elements of the GLOBALG.A.P Aquaculture and Livestock scopes with the GFSI Guidance Document Version 5.

Press release here.

GFSI successfully benchmarks new food safety schemes against the GFSI Guidance Document Version 5

'The Global Food Safety Initiative is pleased to announce recent progress in driving convergence between food safety schemes, following the benchmarking of the FSSC 22000, PrimusGFS, SQF 1000 and Synergy 22000 schemes. These schemes now fully meet the GFSI requirements, laid out in the Guidance Document Version 5.'

This is fantastic news for everyone involved in the Food Industry. 4 more schemes now meet GFSI requirements and the term 'GFSI' is being increasingly used as a requirement to trade with retailers, as opposed to specifying individual standards.

For any further details about this, we'd be happy to provide more information - info@ncsiamericas.com, or visit us on www.ncsiamericas.com

Auditor Competence

One issue we heard about as a recurring theme last week at the GFSI conference is ensuring the industry has competent auditors and assessors.

Consistency between auditors has long been an issue the industry has faced, and recently many organizations face issues with ensuring their auditors are competent.

We believe we've got the mix just right and pride ourselves on the ability to offer highly competent auditors. Our auditors all undergo an internal sign off process, in addition to the various sign off processes mandated by standard owners.

In addition we also run 6 monthly calibration workshops, where we recall ALL of our auditors from around the world to discuss standard updates, and to come to a consensus on the interpretation for a particular standard. This means that should one of our auditors raise one point as a non conformance, so should another, and another, and so on.

But most importantly in this process of ensuring consistency is the role of our Technical Management Team. This teams role includes reviewing all audit reports and they act as the ultimate experts at NCSI Americas on various standards. It's their job to ensure that all of our auditors are calibrated and auditing to standards that our clients have come to expect from NCSI Americas.

GFSI - one step closer to a saner world?

Recently, we attended and exhibited at the GFSI Conference (aka The Consumer Goods Forum aka The Global Food Safety Conference) which was held at the JW Marriott, Washington DC. 3-5 February 2010.

For those not familiar with GFSI, it's an effort to benchmark standards against one another (among other things) so that Food Safety standards can be recognized for what they are.

Many people in the past may make the comment that often retailers and purchasers would request specific standards because they had an agreement with the standard owner, or they understood that standard best. This was often confusing for those involved in the food industry, because as many people would often argue, BRC and SQF (as an example) were mostly the same standard anyway, looking at the same things with only some minor differences - why then, did purchasers refuse to recognize similar standards?

The opinions on that are varied, but it does look like there's a fair amount of momentum in the industry to do away with this adversarial approach. Which is good news.

So what does this mean for those involved in the food sectors?

Ideally, it means less audits, and therefore, less cost to the bottom line. A good thing for everyone involved. If a Certification Body can perform one audit, rather than 15 Certification Bodies performing 15 audits, then everyone wins (except the auditors).

So, the GFSI conference is yet one more small step to this saner world that most in the food industry pine for. We're not there yet, but there's some extremely encouraging signs. Major retailers are now accepting a multitude of standards meaning less audits for our clients.

At the most recent conference, and at the technical committee meetings, it finally looked like there was a solid consensus, and the 700 or so attendees were there kind of people needed to make decisions - CEO's, Managing Directors, Global Directors of Food Safety were the most common titles to be seen.

The next conference is in 2011, and in London. It's yet to be seen if these steps towards GFSI benchmarked standards will prevail - let's all hope it does for the industry's sake.

The Wonderful World Of... Auditing

Auditing... the very word sends shivers down peoples spines. People smile and nod politely when you tell them that you work in the auditing industry, and then make equally polite excuses to leave the conversation.

But it's not all bad, and it's important to differentiate between different types of auditing, and auditors.

NCSI Americas, for example, is focussed on certification of products or systems. This means that more often than not, our auditors go into a business, identify problems in the system, and advise ways to correct these problems. The usual perception of auditors are those that tell you to pay more tax.

Funny joke (if you're an auditor): Why did you become an auditor? Because Accounting was too exciting.

We hope to provide through this blog a few stories that help understand what certification and auditing is, and how NCSI Americas can take the time to understand your business and help you achieve the certification you need.

Our home website is www.ncsiamericas.com (we're a subsidiary of NCSI - www.ncsi.com.au), please feel free to find out a bit more about us. We'll have many more posts up soon.