I’ve never been a fan of third-party audits.
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As Ben and I wrote a few years ago,
“On-farm food safety cannot be just a set of formulaic guidelines; rather, it must be specific to an agricultural site to make it work, as suggested by Rangarajan et al (2002). A one-size-fits-all approach will not work, as the individual producer has many different priorities at any given time during the growing season. Participation of stakeholders has been identified as a missing component in all reviewed programmes. Further, third-party audits are an incomplete form of verification that provide a limited view of a producer’s facilities and documentation but do not effectively reduce risk. Audits are analagous to restaurant inspections, a snapshot of a business’s operating procedures and a visual inspection of facilities. It has been suggested that inspection scores for restaurants are subject to inspector inconsistencies and are not predictive of the likelihood of an outbreak (Cruz et al, 2001; Jones et al 2004). This is likely to be true for producer third-party audits as well.”
At some point, folks will figure out that all these outbreaks of foodborne illness – like Salmonella in peanut butter – happened at places that passed so-called independent audits.
As Abraham Mahshie of The Packer wrote last week,
Increasingly, industry officials are calling for a regulatory benchmark that would create science-based food safety standards for third-party auditors. The result, they say, will be a sharp reduction in the cost of third-party audits that are at times repetitive and arbitrary measures of food safety.
“To me, the real issue in the certification, validation, etc. is there is no real scientific basis,” said Robert Buchanan, director of the Center for Food Systems Safety & Security, College Park, Md. “It hasn’t really been worked out to say, ‘these are the key steps that need to be controlled, or need to be achieved.’” …
He said that global GAP certifications, for example, in his opinion do not certify products for safety. … Buchanan said, in many cases, the third-party auditors are not transparent enough for the scientific community to survey and critically analyze what they are actually measuring.
I said that 10 years ago.
Paul Medeiros, food safety consulting manager for Guelph Food Technology Centre, Guelph, Ontario, said in Canada, many growers and government officials are debating how the standards for food safety should be set and who should provide the oversight once standards are in place.
That may keep a bunch of government and grower-types employed – does nothing for food safety.
Focus on what is going to result in fewer sick people.
Powell DA and Chapman BJ: Fresh Threat: What’s lurking in your salad bowl? J Sci Food Agric 87:1799 – 1801 (2007)