What Is Meant By Food Safety
Food Safety and the New Food Regulations...
In 2019, the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (SFCR) came into law, and these regulations make our country's food system safer. It also means that food safety has a fairly specific meaning for food processors and businesses in Canada. The regulations focus on prevention and allowing the faster removal of unsafe food from the marketplace, and they include requirements related to licensing, traceability, and preventive controls.
What Does Food Safety Mean?
Food safety is a term that means the preservation of food product quality and the prevention of contamination through uncontrolled substances, equipment, processes, and handling practices. It includes the safe handling of every constituent ingredient in the food chain, the proper calibration of the systems and machinery that process the foods, and customized training for your work environment.
Food safety is strengthened and enforced through a set of practices that a company implements to prevent food contamination events that may affect the health of consumers. Programs such as HACCP, SQF, and BRCGS ensure that your food processing services are safe and certified, and GAP Assessments qualify certifications approved by the Global Food Safety Initiative.
Why is Food Safety Important?
The reason food safety should be the highest concern for food facilities is to prevent the final product from harming the consumer. The food that makes it to store shelves must present no risk of foodborne illness, either chronic or acute, to those who buy and serve it.
Foodborne illnesses are a common public health problem, and while an estimated 4 million Canadians contract a foodborne illness every year, many incidents go unreported. The symptoms of these illnesses include nausea, stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, and fever. While most recover relatively quickly, serious complications can occur - in some cases, they can be fatal.
At a company level, strict food safety measures can prevent costly recalls and lawsuits, as well as keep your entire team safe.
How Can You Improve Food Safety?
Food facilities can guarantee the safety of their products through constant inspection, surveillance, storage and sanitation controls. One way of achieving this and giving stakeholders peace-of-mind is achieving HACCP, SQF, and BRCGS certification. These signals to consumers and buyers that you closely monitor, test and confirm every product that comes out of your facility as safe.
The best way to reach these certifications and find potential weaknesses is to have a third-party GAP assessment or audit performed. These are the best ways to get an objective look at your facilities and see how you can improve to stay within SFCR regulations, as well as those in other countries to reach international customers.
Frequently Asked Questions About Food Safety
We need food safety because it's a way to maintain the quality of our food. Food safety is also important for public health, and can help reduce the amount of people who get sick from illnesses that are transmitted through food. In this blog post, we will explore why we need food safety in more depth.
It is natural to want to make sure that the food we eat is safe. Food safety includes many different things, like proper cooking temperatures for meat and vegetables, how fresh your eggs are, and even whether or not you wash your hands before touching your food! Let's talk about some of the most important aspects of food safety so you can protect yourself.
