FONA Wins 2016 Food Quality & Safety Award

So what are FONA’s secrets to food quality and safety success?

Audit-Ready Lifestyle
“We have some principles within FONA that we try to live by,” Slawek begins. “We work hard to be audit-ready 24/7. We want to live an audit-ready lifestyle that allows our customers and industry organizations like AIB (American Institute of Baking) and SQF (Safe Quality Food) to inspect us with or without notice. At FONA, we welcome them with open arms. We want them to see that we strive to be audit-ready 24/7.”

FONA has been a leader in SQF, Slawek emphasizes. “FONA first achieved SQF certification in 2009 and was SQF Manufacturer of the Year in 2012,” he mentions. “At FONA, we view customer audits as an opportunity to improve, as an external organization reviews our processes and offers advice and consultation. As a result, employees are reminded each day of FONA’s commitment to food quality and safety.”

That commitment includes all-important monetary investments. Slawek points out that, every year, FONA invests six-figure amounts in state-of-the-art analytical equipment alone, with more than half a million dollars invested during 2015 and 2016.

“In the past year, instrumentation upgrades for FONA’s product safety and quality laboratory include two automated instruments to perform refractive index and specific gravity,” says John Budin, PhD, FONA’s director of product safety and quality (PS&Q). “A second Fourier transform infrared spectrometer was added to evaluate some raw materials for purity.”

A Setaflash flash point unit was acquired to compliment other flash point methods FONA uses.

“All flavors must have a flash point to satisfy U.S. Department of Transportation requirements for proper packaging and shipping,” Dr. Budin points out.

For research and innovation, FONA purchased a high end Gerstel autosampler for gas chromatography. “This autosampler is connected to an Agilent gas chromatograph, coupled with a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer,” Dr. Budin relates. “This instrument has also been useful for troubleshooting non-conformances.”

In 2015 FONA installed an electronic temperature monitoring system for the company’s walk-in cooler, which is used to store some raw materials and a few finished goods. “This system notifies team members immediately via their work cellphone if the cooler reaches a pre-determined temperature,” says Dr. Budin. “The benefit is they can respond quickly with corrective action.”

Also in 2015, FONA upgraded its campus-wide camera systems to enhance the food defense program with higher resolution of recordings.

(Left) Cassie Krzeszewski, senior applications technologist, FONA; (right) Julie Talkington,senior scientist, FONA. (Image Credit: FONA International)

FONA’s newest big thing is a laboratory information management system (LIMS). It was purchased and configuration began in May this year, following a successful proof of concept phase (POC) launched in December 2015.

“The intent of the POC was to map business software and instrumentation to assure that LIMS was compatible with FONA’s existing systems, and also to assure that the project was accurately budgeted,” says Janis Diasio, FONA’s PS&Q project manager.

The company expects to see a great number of LIMS benefits, such as improved laboratory and quality monitoring efficiency, and greater business intelligence, traceability, and transparency, Diasio relates.

Jonathon DiMaggio, FONA’s analytical laboratory supervisor, emphasizes that what makes this amount of investment even more impressive is the relative size of FONA and its ability to sustain growth. The company continues to grow and increase in revenue year after year, which is unusual in the food industry, he notes.

“FONA is a mid-sized, privately-owned flavor company,” DiMaggio points out. “So the investment in high-tech and high-quality systems and instrumentation is truly remarkable. It shows the company’s commitment to quality. Plus, it enables us to compete with the largest flavor companies in the world, and win.”