An effective food quality management system (QMS) can help food and beverage companies ensure a safe, high-quality end product and maintain compliance. To achieve these objectives, there are a few critical components every food QMS should encompass. Here, we take a look at four of the most noteworthy elements.
1) Supplier Requirements
Your management system should feature a complete list of qualification steps, as well as a way to assess the risk of each new supplier. Food Safety Magazine recommends incorporating a step-by-step process, such as performing audits to gauge the supplier’s strengths and weaknesses, into your vendor approval system.
2) Inspections of Incoming Materials
To be certain your products are safe and compliant, you must first verify the ingredients and materials you receive meet safety and quality requirements. Develop a record keeping system for incoming inspections, and keep track of critical information like date received, quantity, and material information. The FDA also has outlines for performing incoming inspections, including looking for abnormalities in the products and signs of tampering.
3) Supplier Scorecards
Supplier performance should be tracked regularly to ensure suppliers are consistently performing to expectation. Generate reports to track and analyze data, thereby identifying any noteworthy trends.
4) Nonconformances
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, nonconforming material reports (NCMRs) must be developed when any products or materials fail to meet quality control standards. Food and beverage companies should have a way to track not only NCMRs organization-wide, but also by supplier, date, and through other filters.
Of course, these are only just a few of the most important components of a food QMS – clearly, there’s a lot of data to keep track of for any management system within the food and beverage industry. That’s why solutions like food safety software can help. By centralizing all of your critical data, these powerful tools can offer key insights into company performance to help you drive improvement and maintain audit preparedness.
SafetyChain Software offers a cloud-based food quality management system that reduces costs, waste and risk for food companies. Our powerful FSQA platform gives quality and operations managers an easy-to-use tool to automate compliance, safety and quality programs while providing valuable real-time data to help optimize operations.
