Member Article

Company issues food safety warning

A Teesside-based company which launched the UK’s first-ever food safety culture e-learning programme is warning industry professionals that they now have less than six months to demonstrate they meet new national standards.

In August, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) Global Standards issued its latest standard for food safety, known as Issue 8.

Auditing to the new standard will begin from February 2019, giving food manufacturers and other companies in the sector less than six months to prepare.

One of the key strands of the new Standard is evaluating food safety culture.

In 2017, training company totrain, in partnership with world-renowned food safety expert Dr Derek Watson from the University of Sunderland, was the first to launch an e-learning programme which enabled organisations to measure the food safety culture in the workplace.

From October, the company will begin holding a series of site-based training sessions across the UK, including Darlington, Bury and Glasgow, to help businesses prepare for Issue 8.

Totrain Director John Husband said: “Every year, 600 million across the world fall ill after eating contaminated food, with 420,000 dying.

“Food safety compliance breaches happen everywhere, with the cost of food contamination to UK food manufacturers standing at a staggering £16 billion.

“The root cause of this is businesses not complying with food safety culture, so the latest BRC Global Standards Issue 8 is aimed at addressing this, with a major emphasis on food safety.

“We saw this coming when we launched enlighten last year so the courses we will be running in October and November are aimed at giving companies in the food manufacturing sector are in-depth understanding of the new Standard and how they can become audit-ready.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Neil Shaefer .