Dairysafe’s food safety audit system is transforming, and accredited dairy businesses will see changes in Dairysafe’s approach to food safety audits.
The changes include new audit and reporting tools as well as an expanded audit responsibility in the export product space.
The key tool is Dairysafe’s new digital Quality Management System (QMS), which is used to manage accreditation, audit, incident and complaint functions.
Along with this new digital system comes a refreshing way of providing feedback on audit outcomes to dairy farmers, dairy transporters and dairy processors.
New audit reports provide clarity on the systems and elements of the food safety program that are focussed on during the audit and include a stop light rating system with green signalling ‘meets criteria’, orange indicating ‘requires attention’ and red signifying ‘does not comply’.
Dairy farm ratings cover overall hygiene and construction, and additional focus will be placed on dairy surrounds.
“Audit reports no longer focus just on areas of non-compliance and requiring development. Each audit report will acknowledge achievements and improvements,” said Geoff Raven, Dairysafe CEO. “We know this approach will lead to better food safety outcomes and continuous improvement in our industry.
“Attention during the audit has moved away from a focus on individual symptoms – an issue – to concentrating on system-based management – the cause.
“Pleasingly, the change in our audit program has seen a decrease in non-conformance rates for this quarter in all dairy sectors.”
The new digital system provides a powerful ability to filter data, enabling analysis and trending, which can deliver value back to accredited businesses through proactively identifying areas where additional training or resources may be useful to prevent trends becoming incidents.
The next stage of Dairysafe’s digital program is a client portal which will allow an accredited businesses to access their accreditation and audit data.
Businesses will also be able to enter accreditation and annual return details online, and obtain a pdf version of their certificate of accreditation.
Finally, Dairysafe will soon be undertaking audits of export dairy processors on behalf of the Commonwealth Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment.
These changes are aimed at providing value back to the SA dairy industry through increasing confidence as well as supporting market access opportunities.