Quality Control Principles and Processes

2. Establishing consistent standards/benchmarks

To ensure food safety, consistent quality, and customer satisfaction, as well as to reduce waste and losses, a company should develop and follow standard operating procedures (SOPs). These can be regarding quality/sourcing of ingredients, processes, recipes, storage, sanitation or monitoring procedures, etc. A company can develop its own protocols or standards, e.g. following customer feedback, or follow industry standards, like ISO 220000 or HACCP, to name a few.

If data, like temperature etc. is recorded, it can be used for monitoring purposes only (Example 1) or be recorded in a way that is meaningful for decision making in case the procedure needs to be improved (Example 2)

Example 1: A catering company prepares meals in advance and stores them in the cold room for later use. At the venue the meals are reheated and served at a buffet over a period of time. During cooling periods the food should be brought down to below 5°C as quickly as possible. During serving times the food should be kept at temperatures above 57°C. In order to prevent foodborne illness the internal temperature of the hot- and cold-held food is checked periodically with a handheld thermometer and entered into a temperature-time log for monitoring purposes.

Example 2: A company dries sliced mangoes. It is difficult to establish the best procedure to achieve ideal moisture levels of the final product. It is not sufficient to periodically record drier temperatures (e.g. to prove it remained within certain min/max boundries). Instead temperature, duration in the drier, possibly location of the crates, and final moisture level need to be recorded per each lot. Extra information like change of crate position, second drying, etc. should also be added to the lot info. If recorded in this way the collected information provides clues for better understanding and improving of the process.