A happy new year to you all and thanks for your interest in the Food Packaging Safety Forum. Last time, we discussed risk evaluation in order to understand and rate risks to safety and quality. While discussing risk in general, it is important to consider that there are many potential risks within your business. Those risks include risks to your business, employees, supply chain, customer satisfaction and so forth. These risks all need to be understood by the broader organization, but it is important to understand that these are not food safety risks. Simply put, food safety risks are hazards, which are capable of causing harm to humans. From the HACCP process, they are bucketed into three categories of causation: physical, chemical and biological. As an example, the risk from cross contamination of goods during handling and manufacturing is the nightmare that keeps quality managers up at night. While the potential hazards from cross-contamination are always a high priority item for every company, not all cross contamination events represent risk to human safety. This is one reason why facilities are best positioned when risk assessment and HACCP processes are taught and assisted by expert professionals and overseen by those who understand the concepts and objectives, receive ongoing training and engage in practice exercises to verify understanding, application and compliance.
This introduction brings me to the subject of this month’s Forum, which I believe is appropriate to the season. What are the two basic objectives that we focus on in the holiday season? From my perspective, those two are logistics and communication. As we begin to put the holiday “personal master plan” in place, we initially think about the logistics of how we are going to accomplish our objectives involving friends, family, gifts, parties, travel, finances and so on. Without effective communication, though, the degree of difficulty ramps up on all other activities.