Beyond Just Testing

At the heart of these regulatory, public, and private-sector efforts are some core elements of a food safety and quality management system. Establishing and maintaining a compliant system in the food industry has become increasingly complicated, especially for small- to medium-sized growers, distributors, manufacturers, and retailers who may not have the resources to fully address all the changing demands.

Quality Management

To manage the expanding and increasingly complex demands on establishing, maintaining, and improving their food safety and quality management systems, organizations are looking to contract laboratories, not just to play a supporting role through testing services, but to take over some of their core management system elements as a more cost-effective way of doing business. In particular, many small- to medium-sized suppliers do not have the quality assurance staffing or capabilities to meet the newer and constantly changing standard requirements being mandated for compliance by their customers and regulatory authorities.

Many companies use testing laboratories to help them develop internal food safety and quality management systems, but who will complete and maintain all the required activities of the system on an ongoing basis?

Following are some of the core management system compliance requirements in the food industry in which contract laboratories can play an important role. Because contract laboratories should have ISO 17025 accreditation, which has many comparable core requirements, it can be a logical extension for them to help manage similar requirements for clients and their supply chains. In offering these services, contract laboratories often utilize secure web-based portal systems or IT systems that interface directly with those of the client:

• Purchasing management: Food safety and quality management system compliance standards usually require a company to control purchasing processes to ensure that all externally sourced materials and services that have an effect on food safety and quality conform to requirements. A contract laboratory can help an organization manage many areas, including developing specifications, approving suppliers against these specifications, and monitoring ongoing compliance of purchased ingredients and materials to help assure that they remain in control.
• Non-conformance management (NCM): Contract laboratories can help companies identify non-conforming (out-of-spec) products by inspecting incoming materials, investigating customer complaints, or reviewing internal process measures. NCM provides for containment action generation and assigns disposition status. Management of non-conforming materials, customer complaints, and audit findings are a logical extension of work performed through a contract laboratory.
• Corrective and preventive action (CAPA): This is a system of structured, documented actions taken to address existing product or quality problems and prevent their recurrence. Contract laboratories can manage an organization’s CAPA system requirements to record and investigate product, process, or supplier non-conformance problems; perform root-cause analysis and impact analysis; and track progress of events through to resolution. The CAPA system developed typically includes notification and escalation features and dashboard analytics to track CAPA status and cost metrics.
• Complaint management: Contract laboratories can be particularly adept at handling complaints against suppliers and distributors, as well as supporting corrective action and dispute resolution procedures (including charge-back provisions). Complaint management typically includes reports to monitor complaint volume by vendor and product, along with charge-back amounts and disposition.
• Crisis management: Ideally, an organization should have agreements in place before a crisis happens to help with technical guidance and sample testing capacity to address the situation.
• Audit management: One area in which contract laboratories can add great value is in creating and managing the periodic scheduled or event-driven audit requirements of a company, whether initiated by customers, internal teams, or regulatory agencies. Audit management should include reviewing pass/fail results based on qualitative and quantitative criteria, reporting final results, and recommending follow-up actions. It is important to note that any contract laboratory you consider hiring for the management of audits for accreditation purposes must ensure that its certification bodies—those performing accreditation auditing services—are established as separate legal entities. These auditors must be independent of any direct testing and consulting services that you use in order to ensure impartiality and avoid any perceived or actual conflict of interest.
• Training management: Contract laboratories can be highly skilled at scheduling required training and education sessions for employees and maintaining training history records. Look for a contract laboratory that has expertise and training materials available to support employee training in test methods, quality control techniques, current good manufacturing practices, hazard analysis and critical control points, and regulatory requirements.
• Measuring and monitoring equipment management: Any contract laboratory qualified to perform calibration services should be able to manage this function. Services should include scheduling inspection and preventative maintenance of equipment and devices and providing notifications and alerts on pending preventative maintenance schedules.
• Document management: Contract laboratories can serve as a central repository of some or all of the quality documents that need to be accessed by employees, customers, and suppliers, as well as other applications. Document management controls the creation, maintenance, and retrieval of documents relating to standard operating procedures, instructions, product specifications, recipes and handling procedures, and regulatory materials. This would include access control, document sharing, editing, updating, and version control features.
• Regulatory management: A contract testing laboratory can help ensure that an organization is being kept up to date with the latest relevant information, including proposed regulations, new regulations, and active recalls. A related area would be reviewing packaging materials and formulations for compliance with regulatory requirements.

Find the Right Partner

If your company is looking to manage its food safety and quality systems more efficiently, a full-service contract laboratory could provide the expertise and services you need. Keep in mind that most food compliance standards require that companies that choose to outsource any process that might affect food quality must still have control over such processes and that control of any outsourced processes is identified, documented, and monitored within the food quality management system. Make sure this is part of any contractual agreement you forge with an outside laboratory.