Global Food Safety Initiative: The Next Phase

The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) is due to complete the first test phase of a tool that was specially developed for small suppliers around the world. The official launch will come next February at the Global Food Safety Conference in London.

GFSI began work on this program in late 2008 in order to assist smaller or less developed suppliers—with a special focus on developing countries—to achieve the basic levels of food safety they must ensure to do business with today’s major retailers, food service operators, and manufacturers around the world. Against a background of ever longer and more complex supply chains and increasing consumer pressure to reduce the carbon footprints of food products, whether or not the program is needed is clearly a moot point.

The program’s key objective is to provide a common approach to food safety at the lowest possible cost to the supplier while allowing for continuous improvement that leads, over a three-year period and by means of an intermediate level, to formal certification to a GFSI recognized food safety scheme. Its intention is to create opportunities for the less-developed or smaller supplier to progress from supplying on a strictly local basis to being able to export. The concept provides an excellent opportunity for local sourcing and increased trade opportunities over time.

A bridge in Kodambakkam, a residential area in Chennai, India. Chennai is a pilot site for a new GFSI initiative developed to train small suppliers around the world.

The First Level

The first level of the program was developed based on the internal requirements of a number of major companies. These were combined with Codex Alimentarius to produce requirements covering three areas: food safety systems (specifications, traceability, incident management, non-conforming products, and corrective actions), good manufacturing practices (personal hygiene, facility environment, pest and contamination control, water quality, and cleaning and disinfection), and control of food hazards (including allergens).

The program involved, from a very early stage, internationally acknowledged food safety experts; academics; representatives of service providers and certification bodies; major international bodies, such as the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO); and a wide variety of other stakeholders, both public and private. Clearly, the program’s organizers recognize the fact that a collaborative approach to building trade capacity is the best way to establish consensus and avoid the proliferation of schemes and standards around the world.

The Global Markets Working Group, established in 2009 at a meeting in Chicago, decided the program’s scope would cover the manufacturing, distribution, and storage of processed foods and the preparation of primary products, initially for the purposes of local sourcing, manufacturing, and selling. The group also decided, in the interests of cost efficiency and simplicity, that the approach to achieving the continuous improvement desired would be based on unaccredited assessment of the supplier along with an additional checklist for the supplier’s self-assessment.

Whereas the emphasis of the global markets program is very much on the commercial supplier/customer relationship, an opportunity was nevertheless identified to develop a training program that would take the company requirements and translate them into a set of competencies needed by any employees with responsibility for food safety, even those working for a small supplier. The concept was designed to be inexpensive, effective, and accessible to all food safety professionals, irrespective of a company’s size.

An Extended Work Phase

Given the groundbreaking nature of the global markets program and the need to “get it right” before going public, the working group decided to embark on an extended test phase evaluating both the requirements themselves and the suitability of the chosen approach. At the same time, the training program would test the potential for extending the program to individual food safety professionals.