Focus on Food Safety: Between a rock and a hard place

The challenge now faced by management is to decide upon the incremental measures to be taken to assure food safety. This is not easy to do, especially if all of your competitors are working at the lowest common denominator and your margins are already paper thin. If you have a good rapport with the customer, one strategy to justify a higher cost for better quality is to be completely transparent on costing. Explain and justify the processes your firm uses to assure quality and food safety. If the message is delivered well, this strategy can work even if the buyer is unfamiliar with your firm.

Cost Savings vs. Food Safety
Are there ways to cut costs without compromising food safety and product quality? Yes! In fact there is an entire science behind cost cutting. Cost savings and food safety can be reconciled by adequate testing to validate that the cost-cutting measures do not negatively impact product safety and quality.

Such tests must be carefully planned and executed. Cost-cutting programs must have senior executive approval to be successful, and should include senior personnel from the QA, Operations, Finance and Sales functions. Project timelines and objectives need to be carefully laid out, agreed to by all members and, above all, thoroughly documented.

The final decision to implement a cost-saving measure cannot be made on the result of a single test. In my opinion, at least three tests should be done, starting on a small scale to work the bugs out and eventually working up to full shift. Above all, focus on cutting costs, not food safety.

Dr. Ron Wasik, PhD, MBA, is president of RJW Consulting Canada Ltd. Contact him at rwasik@rjwconsultingcanada.com </p