Clark Food Safety Education hosted a very successful program for “Qualified Individuals” as required by GSMA. Twenty-six Clark Pest Control service customers representing a variety of food processing operations attended the FSCPA course taught by Ron Vail from ACET Global Consulting.
The course covered all of the required topics established by the FSPCA alliance for developing preventive control programs in a food processing plant. The emphasis of the training is to recognize the difference between the traditional Critical Control Points associated with a Hazard Analysis Critical Control Program and the development of Preventive Controls. This requires a broader view of risk analysis and collection of verifiable data.
The focus of the new provisions of the Food Safety Modernization Act is in truly preventing food safety issues from reaching the customer where injury, illness or death may occur. The preventive controls require an examination of the entire process for ingredient/component supply through the process to distribution. Label checks for accuracy that were typically a prerequisite program component now are expressed in the context of a preventive control. Incoming inspection and requirements for sensitive ingredients would be another that fall into the classification of a preventive control since preventing a potential hazard entering the process from the materials is an imperative for food safety regardless of the economic consequences.
Attendees at the 2.5 day class expressed appreciation for the relaxed learning environment, the openness of the instructor and support provided by the Clark staff.
Comments from the attendees included “I certainly learned a lot in this course”, “I really appreciate Clark offering this quality of training for their customers”. “Great facility for learning” and more.
Watch for more offerings from the Clark Food Safety program in the near future. One course on the drawing board is “Managing the requirements of GFSI” This program would be offered as a back-to-back program with one day dedicated to SQF and the other to BRC certification programs.
