To assure consumer confidence that bottlers’ products are of the highest quality, supplier partners must play a leading role in enhancing quality assurance measures and making strides in the global effort to ensure food safety.
African nations are paving the way to standardise and improve quality assurance/control. In the past year, select Sub-Saharan and North African countries made notable regulatory changes, as well as strides toward growing overall consumer awareness of food safety issues.
These efforts included the East African Community’s Regional Workshop on Harmonization of Food Safety Measures, which offered a Better Training for Safer Food (BTSF) in Africa initiative. This initiative aims to educate participants about specific EU laws designed to ensure consumer protection, in the hope that this knowledge will ultimately ease access to the EU market.
Similarly, the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI)’s focus days brought global and regional food safety experts together to facilitate collaboration, knowledge exchange and best practices surrounding the push for tighter regulations and enforcement in Africa.
Now more than ever, beverage manufacturers are challenged to comply with ever-evolving regulations. It’s vitally important to work with an experienced supplier that understands the changing industry landscape and can play an essential role in helping improve a bottler’s product quality, all while preventing product recall.
Bottlers must take extra steps to ensure compliance with export regulations. In light of the stringent food safety regulations increasingly adopted worldwide, bottlers must guarantee that all of their raw ingredients and procedures meet or exceed regulatory standards to ensure a high-quality/safe product.
In addition to raw materials, export regulations will examine the source of the water supply and water treatment system being used. When developing a water treatment system, bottlers should plan for constant monitoring of the water chemistry and extensive employee training on water standards, as well as conservation, sustainability and proper cleaning measures.
The complexity of these regulations makes it essential to work with a supplier partner whose expertise and services can provide regulatory services for ingredients and water supply; one that can ensure products comply with the highest food safety standards around the world.
Best practices mandate that a company know the codes. Bottlers must be aware of country-wide health and safety standards in order to receive up to date certifications of approval.
As a first step, bottlers must follow Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) and Good Hygiene Practice (GHP), which outline standards in quality control for raw ingredients, as well as standards of hygiene to be applied to manufacturing premises, machinery, personnel and training.
GMP practices help bottlers prepare for regulatory inspections and set the stage for certification in the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) food safety management system. Bottlers must ensure quality management and employee commitment to help execute HACCP practices, which are designed to prevent hazards that can occur during production and preparation, contaminate the finished product, and make it unsafe.
Compliance with HACCP ensures that each process step is analysed for contamination and that proper procedures are set in place to control and prevent potential hazards. These procedures range from proper food safety monitoring, which includes ingredients and water management systems, record keeping, corrective actions as well as critical control limits. Compliance with each of these HACCP procedures allows manufacturers to detect potential food safety hazards well ahead of time.
Bottlers must work with seasoned suppliers who can implement rigid testing for concentrates/ingredients and samples that must be tested and in compliance before the final beverages leave the factory. It’s crucial that sample analyses for water, sweeteners and finished products be routinely tested to ensure GMP, GHP and food safety compliance.
As food safety regulations in Africa evolve, beverage manufacturers can ensure compliance with greater ease by understanding and utilising the resources available to them.
They can meet the necessary goals by seeking out supplier partners that meet the highest international food safety and quality assurance standards.
Omar Al-Saigh is director of quality and technical services, Royal Crown Cola International.
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