How to Prepare for Stress-Free Audits
Ranjeet Klair
Painting over mold before an audit isn’t an uncommon practice for food and beverage manufacturers. Rushing to “tidy up” before the auditor shows doesn’t just fail to mask issues, it often raises bigger questions about your processes and food safety culture.
Auditors can literally smell last-minute “fixes.” Just like an investigative hound, they can sense stress and know when a facility isn’t operating as it normally does. But audits don’t have to feel like a high-stakes performance. Director of Food Safety and former auditor, Ranjeet Klair, shares insights on how to stop scrambling and build confidence in your compliance. The key lies in preparation that isn’t limited to the days leading up to an external audit but extends year-round, with robust internal audits laying the foundation for success.
How Audit Prep Goes Wrong
If your audit preparation feels chaotic, you’re not alone. Many manufacturers fall into common traps that turn audits into a stressful ordeal. According to Ranjeet, who has led and participated in over 200 audits, these are the most common missteps:
Siloing FSQA Responsibility
When compliance responsibilities rest solely on the QA team, gaps are inevitable. An organization where employees point to QA as the sole owner of compliance, or leadership is absent from food safety discussions, raises red flags. QA can’t be everywhere at once, and expecting them to chase down maintenance or production teams creates burnout and inefficiencies.
What to Do Instead: Share responsibility across teams by assigning ownership of compliance tasks and documentation. Compliance standards have sections relevant to specific departments. Sharing and assigning responsibility for those sections with relevant departments allows you to act as a “mini-auditor,” ensuring food safety is up to par before audit day.
For example:
Maintenance: FSQA likely doesn’t know when a contractor is available or when parts are on backorder. If maintenance repairs affect food safety, any and all temporary or future fixes need to be documented and ready for auditor questioning.
Lack of Contingency Plans
What happens when the key person responsible for your audit prep is sick or unavailable? Paper-based systems and single points of failure create awkward moments, especially when auditors request documentation you can’t find.
What to Do Instead: Digitize your documentation and ensure multiple stakeholders have access to critical records. A centralized digital system like SafetyChain allows your team to continue seamlessly, even when someone is unexpectedly out.
Copy-Pasting Last Year’s Risk Assessments
Treating risk assessments as static documents signal to auditors that you’re not evolving with changes in your supply chain, operations, or regulations. Risks are dynamic, and outdated assessments reflect complacency rather than proactive management.
What to Do Instead: Regularly review and update your risk assessments to reflect current challenges and conditions. This approach ensures your facility is resilient and shows auditors you’re staying ahead of potential risks.
Focusing on Checklists Instead of Culture
Auditors don’t just want to see boxes checked—they’re assessing your food safety culture. Thorough checklists are useful tools but when they are the plant floor’s only real understanding or acknowledgment of food safety, the organization is more vulnerable to auditor scrutiny. An overemphasis on checklists can inadvertently encourage plant personnel to solely focus on checklist questions, not the big picture. And it’s hard to have a checklist to address the broad circumstances at a plant.
What to Do Instead: Build a culture where everyone understands their role in compliance:
Survey employees to gauge their understanding of food safety responsibilities.
Include senior management in audit meetings to show leadership commitment.
Celebrate proactive behavior, like reporting risks or catching issues early.
Lengthy or Unfocused Meetings
Audit prep meetings shouldn’t be a burden. Lengthy, aimless discussions drain energy and discourage the enthusiasm needed to promote a food safety culture. Purposeful meetings focused on past audit scores or known gaps keep teams aligned without overwhelming them, ensuring that everyone leaves with clear deliverables.
What to Do: Use short, focused updates like 15-minute stand-ups to align teams on priorities. Schedule deeper review sessions closer to audit day for detailed document checks or training.
Audit Readiness: A Real-Life Example
For Nichols Farms’ Food Safety and Sanitation Director, Jennifer Dunlap, demonstrating Nichols Farms is a food-safety driven organization in an audit means plant-wide engagement in their FSQA strategy. The FSQA team at Nichols Farms hasn’t added any headcount to their team of four despite product volume doubling over 80 million pounds a year, 12,000 pounds an hour.
What began as a CCP initiative quickly gained momentum once Operations and Maintenance teams saw the impact SafetyChain’s digital forms had on efficiency. The FSQA team’s digitization efforts acted as internal social proof, facilitating the plant-wide adoption of digital forms and a strong food safety culture. What began as a data-driven solution for one department has evolved into a process-driven system for the plant floor. Read the full story here.
How Audit Prep Goes Right
While addressing common audit preparation pitfalls can significantly reduce stress leading up to external audits, they’re only part of the solution. A strong internal audit program is the backbone of proactive compliance, providing continuous oversight and improvement throughout the year.
Internal audits aren’t just practice runs for the real thing—they’re a critical process for identifying and addressing gaps long before external auditors arrive. Here’s how internal audits can take your audit readiness to the next level.
The Role of Internal Audits in Audit Readiness
Audits are often seen as an annual event, a moment in time when a snapshot of compliance is taken. However, relying solely on external audits to evaluate your facility’s food safety practices is risky. Issues that remain unchecked for an entire year can fester into systemic problems, increasing the likelihood of a failed audit, recalls, or worse.
Internal audits, however, are much more than a compliance exercise—they are an essential tool for building a stronger, more resilient food safety program.
Internal Audits Are More Than a Snapshot
While external audits focus on evaluating what’s visible in a specific moment, internal audits provide a continuous, deeper review of your facility’s practices. They go beyond finding dirt or documentation gaps to assess systemic risks, such as inadequate training or ineffective workflows.
What This Looks Like:
Evaluating whether the root causes of past non-conformances have been addressed.
Using “fresh eyes” to challenge assumptions about existing processes. Don’t have the maintenance team audit their own practices and bring in their bias to the audit.
Measuring whether your team’s food safety intentions align with their actual capacity to execute tasks effectively.
Key Elements of an Effective Internal Audit Program
A strong internal audit program goes beyond ticking boxes. Here are the essential components:
Trained Internal Auditors
Untrained auditors often default to surface-level observations. Effective internal auditors must have both technical expertise and an understanding of auditing skills, such as root cause analysis and risk assessment.
Risk-Based Focus
Not all parts of your operation carry equal risk. A good internal audit program prioritizes areas where the potential for non-conformance is highest—whether that’s supplier documentation, allergen handling, or sanitation practices in high-traffic areas.
Actionable Findings
Internal audits should lead to meaningful improvements. Findings must be tied to specific corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs), and those actions must be tracked to completion.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Internal audits aren’t just an FSQA activity. Involving team members from maintenance, production, and operations ensures audits are thorough and capture the perspectives of all stakeholders.
Common Pitfalls in Internal Audits
Internal audits are powerful tools, but only if executed effectively. Here are some common mistakes that limit their impact:
Checklist Dependency: Internal audits that rely too heavily on static checklists fail to address the bigger picture. These audits might confirm compliance with specific requirements but miss underlying systemic risks.
Rushed Audits: Time constraints often lead to audits that skim over critical areas. Effective audits require planning and adequate time to evaluate processes thoroughly.
Weak Follow-Up: Even the best audits are useless if their findings aren’t acted on. Weak corrective actions or incomplete preventive plans can leave your facility vulnerable to repeat issues.
How to Avoid These Pitfalls:
Equip auditors with the training and resources they need to go beyond checklists. FSQA leads are subject matter experts and should leverage their creativity to inform internal auditors.
Allocate dedicated time for audits so they’re not rushed between other responsibilities.
Build follow-up on findings into your management reviews to ensure accountability.
Strengthening Your Audit Strategy
Leverage Internal Audits to Build a Stronger Culture
Internal audits are not just about catching non-conformances—they are an opportunity to foster a proactive food safety culture.
Employee Involvement: Use audits as a chance to involve employees from different departments in identifying and mitigating risks. This helps build a sense of ownership and accountability.
Open Discussions: Encourage teams to openly discuss challenges during internal audits. When audits are framed as opportunities for improvement rather than fault-finding exercises, they become tools for growth.
Tracking Progress: Use audit findings to measure progress over time, celebrating improvements and addressing lingering issues with urgency.
Build Internal Audit Results Into KPIs
To maximize the value of your internal audits, tie their results to measurable goals.
Examples of KPIs:
Reduction in the number of repeat non-conformances.
Increase in employee participation during audits.
Time-to-completion for corrective actions.
Improvements in specific areas, such as sanitation scores or supplier compliance rates.
By integrating internal audit results into your KPIs, you ensure that audits are not a one-time activity but an ongoing driver of accountability and progress.
The ROI of Internal Audits
Internal audits are not just about avoiding penalties—they also deliver significant business value:
Cost Savings: Proactively identifying and resolving issues reduces the risk of recalls, fines, or failed customer audits.
Operational Efficiency: Audits often reveal inefficiencies in workflows or resource allocation, allowing you to streamline operations.
Customer Trust: Regular internal audits signal to customers that your facility is committed to excellence, strengthening your reputation and relationships.
The ROI of Audit Strategy: A Real-Life Example
For Jennifer Hamby, QA Manager at Joyce Farms, audits were once a source of stress. Outdated software meant it took days to prepare for scheduled audits and made unannounced audits daunting. In a previous BRC audit, missing documents led to a B rating. After adopting SafetyChain’s Digital Plant Management platform, Jennifer’s team transformed their process, maintaining records daily to ensure audit readiness at any time.
During an unannounced BRC audit, Jennifer had no time to prepare but didn’t need to. “I pulled into the parking lot as the auditor was checking in,” she explained. With SafetyChain, all documentation was organized and accessible, earning Joyce Farms an AA+ score.
"The auditor said this was the smoothest and easiest audit he has ever conducted.”
By eliminating prep time by 100% and enabling daily updates, SafetyChain allowed Jennifer’s team to focus on food safety—not scrambling for documents. See the exact process Jennifer uses here.
Building a Stronger, More Resilient Compliance Program
Audit readiness is about demonstrating proactive management and a commitment to continuous improvement. Transparency and honesty—not last-minute fixes—build trust with auditors and show that your facility operates with integrity. Digitizing your processes further strengthens this foundation, ensuring your team has instant access to critical records while reducing errors and inefficiencies.
Addressing issues as they arise and leveraging tools like SafetyChain to digitize checks, centralize documentation, and manage audit readiness positions your organization for successful audits and long-term operational resilience. Start building confidence in your compliance today—because a well-prepared team makes audit day just another day.
