The International Organization for Standards (ISO) has developed a new standard for food safety: ISO 22003, the latest tool in the inspection toolbox, bringing further clarity into a detail oriented industry.
The recent theme for World Food Safety Day was ‘Safer food, better health’; fittingly, this is timed with the release of the new ISO 22003 standard.
There is clear data that backs up the development of further standards and guidelines for the global food industry, with the WHO stating that 600 million cases and 420,000 deaths globally are related to foodborne issues.
30 per cent of food-related fatalities occur among children under the age of five.
It is only through setting standards and regulations that the global food industries can improve the safety of food globally, encouraging development around the world.
Today, the vast majority of ISO standards are used within paperless inspection platforms so that inspectors can carry out inspections in line with a standard and can avoid carrying their entire documentation on a paper checklist.
Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are the tool of choice for most digital inspection providers, with these devices being used with a mobile inspection application.
This means that the inspector, technicians and other stakeholders can be carrying out a routine safety check of a food manufacturing asset, before moving onto another checklist on the same application, such as an inspection in line with ISO 22003.
Within one area, the inspector can carry out multiple inspections; food, facility or safety-related.
The benefit of using such a setup is that the inspector will quickly become familiar with the structure of the checklist and carrying out each audit or inspection will take less time.
By using the features of the mobile device, the inspector can capture information and record it faster than the usual pen and paper checklist method.
Mobile devices, whether smartphones or tablets now allow inspectors to make recordings in a simpler and quicker manner.
Whether that’s using the device camera to take a picture, annotate and then add to the checklist, or scanning barcodes, RFID or using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags, mobile devices are much better equipped than a pen.
Alongside the variations in data inputs, the checklists themselves can use standardised reporting layouts or intelligent workflows to know whether answers have been previously covered. For example: if a check in a subpart fails, based on the checklist you can have the inspection fail or pass with a note of a failure within a subpart.
Other features that are useful to inspectors are things such as speech-to-text services and Date/Time/GPS timestamps; both may seem like trivial additions but can save inspection personnel valuable time in making recordings on the inspection.
When issues or incidents are discovered, time is invaluable in sending the inspection report and getting a problem addressed as quickly as possible. This is also helped by the often-present feature of triggers and automatic notification embedded into the application and checklist structure.
Upon failure or non-conform of a report or checklist, this can be sent to the necessary personnel such as maintenance teams who can assess whether equipment downtime or replacement food machinery needs to be ordered.
Food manufacturing staff using the machinery can also receive an alert of the issue or inspection outcome so that they know whether the asset is safe to use, or whether anything needs to be noted out of the ordinary procedures.
Food inspection is a large and broad field which needs tailoring and an understanding of how standards apply.
Inspection needs may differ between sectors; i.e. a food manufacturing organisation compared to a food certification regulator.
Alongside the power of industry standards such as ISO 22003, the top tool available to all organisations and inspectors is the mobile device and paperless inspection solution.
