Food Quality and Safety Intertwined

In his recent article “Striking the right balance between safety and quality”, Kevin Higgins, the Senior Editor at Food Engineering, wrote about the interconnection between quality and safety programs and interviewed several people in the industry. Although most understood quality in this context implied process management and meeting specifications, there were some that discussed quality in the product grade sense. That misperception complicates the effort to develop and explain much of the workings of a Food Safety Management System (FSMS)

Active process management programs in conjunction with HACCP based food safety programs are at the heart of the modern FSMS as defined in ISO 22000, the GFSI audit schema and the Food Safety Modernization Act. John Surak and I first demonstrated that linkage in a 1998 article “Integrating HACCP and SPC” which examined the role of an SPC based process management program in maintaining safe food production in a Butterball Turkey plant. As we said about those findings, food safety is ultimate justification of high capability manufacturing.