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Top five regulatory compliance tips for F&B businesses
15 December 2022
Regulatory compliance is important for all food and beverage (F&B) businesses to avoid penalties, loss of reputation or harm to consumers.
With many challenges involved in meeting health and safety obligations, the whole process can feel overly complicated, especially since regulations apply to every stage of F&B production, from processing to distribution.
Meeting your organisation’s obligations starts with setting up a system that takes everything into account and makes sure everyone is on the same page.
Here are five tips to help you keep track of your organisation’s compliance requirements:
Plan ahead to understand your obligations
Identify your annual compliance requirements and get them into your company calendar as soon as possible. Scheduling tasks and reviews beforehand will make sure your team can meet expectations when the time comes around.
Additionally, ensure this calendar is reviewed regularly, with reminders built in as well, so everyone involved in compliance has plenty of warning about the activity they’ll need to undertake well in advance.
Get to know the regulators
Communicate with the relevant contacts at the regulatory authorities you’re dealing with throughout the year. This will ensure that you understand what they expect from you when you make submissions.
For example, on a federal level, Food Standards Australia New Zealand develops and manages the Food Standards Code and HACCP Australia oversees the application of hazard analysis and critical control point methodology in the F&B industry.
Engaging with contacts at these authorities can help you keep on top of your regulatory compliance tasks and stay up to date with changing regulations around food and beverage safety.
Create effective policies and procedures
To ensure you can deliver on your requirements, you should create effective policies and procedures within your organisation to make the job less complicated for your team.
When there’s a system built around meeting regulatory requirements, everyone is aware of what they need to do at all times.
This involves ensuring you know which people are responsible for what regulatory tasks and empowering these people to work with various departments to gather all relevant information when preparing submissions to regulators.
Record regulatory violations
If mistakes or accidents do occur during processing, manufacturing or distribution, you should keep records not only for the authorities but also for your team.
To avoid making the same mistakes over and over again, it’s vital for your staff to understand where problems can occur and what strategies can be taken to prevent them.
The repercussions from failing to meet regulations can result in product recalls, reinspections, lost production time, lasting reputational damage, lost customers, litigation or injury to staff.
Keeping track of any violations and the impact they have on your business will encourage continuous improvement for your organisation.
Automate, automate, automate
For the sake of your team, find programs and tools to automate processes wherever possible.
Various processes from data entry to report generation can be automated with work management software, such as Xugo, taking the burden off staff and allowing them to redirect their efforts to other priorities.
Be prepared when the time comes
Xugo is intuitive and comprehensive, making regulatory compliance go from complex to straightforward. With the right software, your organisation will be ready whenever the regulator comes knocking.
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