Relationship between QMS in food products and FSMS

 

This is an important issue for all those who carry out safety or quality management activities in the food sector, in compliance with ISO 9000 or ISO 22000 standards. Apparently, for many people this interrelation is not clearly observed, both among different characteristics of a food product and between these management systems standards, both quality and safety, when they can be used by an organization that is part of the food chain. 

I have met several professionals in this area who have some confusion in defining how quality management elements can be included within a food safety management system, since it is common to consider that the quality of a food is something totally different from its safety.

This issue has always been important in the management of international standards, both ISO 9000 for quality management systems and ISO 22000 for food safety management systems, but it has become more relevant now than the main schemes of food safety standardization and certification, in addition to the aforementioned ISO 22000: 2018 standard, among which BRC, IFS, SQF and FSSC22000 stand out, they are applying certification programs integrating safety elements with quality elements.

It is worth clarifying that this FSSC22000 scheme is based on the latest version of ISO 22000 stadard, with some additional requirements, such as the corresponding Prerequisite Programs (PPR) according to the technical specifications of the sector (for example, ISO / TS 22002-x ; PAS xyz) and some additional requirements of the FSSC 22000, as established by the interested parties, such as those for Service Management, Product Labeling, Food Defense, Food Fraud Mitigation and use of the foundation's logo, and manage within its spectrum of recognized certifications, a joint certification scheme with ISO 9001.

This FSSC22000 Foundation, in case you do not know it, which is an organization located in the Netherlands that, although it does not reach its first decade of operation, has a great international recognition, with 128 recognized certifying bodies in 124 countries, currently, with more than 22800 certificates issued and is endorsed by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI).

Similarly, the BRC as the IFS and the SQF have jointly managed the elements of food safety management with several of quality management.

This tells us that for many people it is important to jointly consider food safety schemes with quality ones. However, there is a premise that nobody mentions regarding this issue, but which is important to consider: "The safety of a food is part of its quality." Simple, don´t you think?

If we understand as "quality" of a food its ability to meet the needs or expectations of a customer, and that the "safety" of that food is that it does not harm the person who consumes it, and if we consider that in many cases the customer is the one who consumes the food, would it not be reasonable to think that among those needs of the custmer would be that the food does not cause harm?

It is important to establish that a food can have a variety of characteristics, which can be considered as quality aspects, such as: appearance, texture, colour, aroma, flavour, maturity, integrity, packaging, labelling, among others, and, in addition to all this, its safety conditions.

So if it is so easy to understand, why do we try to decouple the two management systems?

I think you know how complicated a food safety management system is. That an organization can identify, apply and verify compliance with all the requirements of this safety system is a great task, even for organizations with relatively simple processes. With the so-called prerequisite programs, considering good agricultural and/or manufacturing practices, as well as operational sanitation procedures, together with the preparation and execution of the hazards analysis and critical control points, and from there the establishment, operation, monitoring, and control of the Safety Plan (HACCP Plan) requires the continuous attention of several people within each organization.

If an organization is making such efforts to establish a food safety management system, why not address the other aspects of the quality of its products within its management system? I think this should be logical and natural for every organization.

If you have read some other popsts on this blog, you will have noticed that I repeatedly refer to standards and standardization schemes, and I wanted to do this because for many professionals in the field of standard management systems, the requirements specified by a standard are the only consideration that is worth, and my opinion is that it is always convenient to know some background of these standards, so that they have been elaborated and what is expected of their use. This helps us understand not only the text of the standard, but also its context, which is so important for the correct understanding and application of the normative elements. If you do not know and understand the context of a standard, even if you memorize all its requirements and can recite them to the right and the other way around, it is very difficult to understand the value that these requirements have for the management system and for the organization itself, so you will have little chance of applying it properly.

Additionally, we cannot ignore that the standards are elaborated by people, who although they have knowledge of the subject to be standardized, they do not necessarily have to know everything about that subject. All media professionals are learning and generating valuable experience that can be used in the next generation of standards, enriching them during the revision processes.

For example, if you analyse the history of the ISO 9001 standard, through its different versions, you will easily notice that there have been very important changes, from the structure of the standard itself, to the way in which its requirements are identified and written. This has been achieved from the learning and experience that has been generated, in the years that this standard has been used, in the people who participate in its reviews. however, in no way has the objective of this standard been lost.

The ISO 22000 standard, as mentioned, is more recent, and has only one revision, the one from 2018 in which, personally, I did not have the opportunity to participate, but some important changes were generated in its structure and presentation of requirements.

I always recommend that if it is in our possibilities, we participate in this standardization process, and if it is not possible for us, we should be aware of the information generated during that process, and not just the resulting standard. Suddenly one comes across information that may be relevant to our knowledge and to our professional performance.

For example, going back to the food safety management system, if we analyse it carefully, we can see that all this complex scheme of systematized safety already mentioned, among its different requirements, to manage its Safety Plan or HACCP Plan, fits perfectly within the requirements of ISO 9001. You just analyse the "Clause 8 - Operation" and its sub-clauses and requirements of this standard.

From my personal point of view, if it were not for the particular complexity of safety management, coupled with the diversity of elements that must be considered throughout the food chain, the international standard of food safety management system should have simply been one more ISO 9000 sector standard, as there are already several more.

But since it was established as a different family of standards, numbered 22000, both for what I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and surely for other considerations, for organizations in the agri-food sector, the joint application of both standards, ISO 9000 and ISO 22000, should be the most common and appropriate.

Under this consideration, anyone may ask: If safety is part of the quality of a food, why is it not simply included in the quality management system of the organization that produces it?

This is where we find an element that can explain this circumstance, although it can cause some confusion at the same time. There is a consideration at the international level that suggests that quality management systems should not be considered mandatory, since undesirable situations could be generated, such as corruption, extortion, among other negative conditions, and among these, one of the worst it would be promoting the mediocrity of these systems in terms of improving efficiency.

If we refer particularly to the quality of a food, generally a customer or consumer, under reasonably common conditions, has the ability to identify and evaluate the quality aspects that are important to him or her: its texture, smell, taste, and all previously mentioned; all those aspects, except for safety. The main characteristic of the safety of a food is that, in general, the person who is going to eat a food cannot know if it has an excessive bacterial load, or specifically some highly pathogenic bacteria, or a large amount of pesticide residues, veterinary drugs or chemical products, something that causes an allergic reaction, among other possibilities of causing damage. Therefore, commonly a customer or consumer of a food cannot know, no matter how much they observe, smell or taste it, if that food is safe or not, and if applicable, whether it contains one or more contamination hazards that may cause harm to whoever consumes it.

That is why the safety schemes and requirements are managed by the health authorities of the different countries, mainly as mandatory technical regulations, and increasingly, these authorities require the application of the HACCP system for certain foods, in addition to a wide variety of different technical regulations.

The voluntary schemes of standardization and certification that exist are not to exceed the authority of governments, but to help organizations establish systematic controls over their safety scheme, which help them to consistently comply with these sanitary regulations, as well as requirements of its clients, without affecting the productive and financial performance of the organizations that apply them. This is the main reason for its success worldwide.

 

Personally, I think it is absurd to think that companies in the food sector should choose one management system over another. At the end of the day, the businessmen of this food sector and professionals who are in the field of consulting, education or training for work and who could guide them in this kind of decision, should be aware that these organizations should attend to all the elements that lead their products to comply with all the legal, regulatory and quality requirements that are demanded by their customers and regulatory agencies, whether they are municipal, state and federal.

 

Author:

Ernesto Palomares Hilton