Food Safety Risk Assessment Software

Which concerns can our Risk Assessment Software (UK) resolve?

• Standalone food safety risk assessments on various spreadsheets taking too much time to populate and maintain.

• Inconsistent risk assessments across your sites or teams, this can often result in different risk profiles depending on who has completed the risk assessment.

• Auditors questioning or challenging how risk assessments are completed.

• A lack of visibility of supplier or product risk assessment history over time.

• The uncertainty that all risk mitigation plans and actions are up to date and being completed.

What are the main categories of risk?

When risk assessing suppliers we recommend breaking potential risks and the related control measures into the following discrete sections and then using a step by step approach to work through the hazards and risks in each section.

• Food Safety Management & Technical Risks. These will cover the likelihood and impact and potentially the severity of a supplying site presenting a food safety risk to your business and brand. Likely variables to consider would include, supplier certification status, years that the supplier has been supplying your business, the supplier performance over time, supplier technical team capabilities, country of origin of supplier, type of products supplied.

This is not an exhaustive list and every QADEX customer uses our risk assessment software to complete supplier and product risk assessments in different ways. Every food safety risk assessment is configured to the preference of the customer technical team, with extensive best practice guidance from our implementation team.

Fraud & Adulteration Risks (VACCP/TACCP). In this section you are typically looking at hazards and risks related to products being adulterated or substituted. This adulteration or substitution can take many well documented forms, such as beef being substituted with horsemeat or organic products being substituted with conventional products. The reality is that there are thousands of different ways that products within a large food businesses supply chain could be adulterated or substituted that are too numerous to mention.

QADEX has an advanced horizon scanning capability built into our risk management software which saves time by providing real time alerts to customers of potential fraud and adulteration risks.

Residues. In this category, you are typically looking at pesticide residues and ensuring maximum residue levels (MRL’s) are not being exceeded or non-permitted residues are present. For meat based proteins veterinary residues are often a concern. Typically a well designed food safety risk assessment will consider residue risk control for specific categories of raw material.

Allergens. Now one of the biggest risk areas for all food and drink businesses. Allergen risk management is where the QADEX risk assessment software UK and Europe version is transforming risk reduction for businesses by reducing the risk of our customers being involved in a food recall by 25%. To find out more about how QADEX risk assessment software does this contact us now.

Modern Slavery and Ethical Risks. At the time of writing this content, UK media is in a frenzy about the Boohoo labour exploitation down the road from our offices in the Leicester textile supply chain. What the media are not commenting upon is that these same businesses are unlikely to be focused on the health and safety of their employees or any other area of risk compliance.

While the Boohoo example relates to textiles there have been numerous examples of modern slavery and labour exploitation within the food and drink supply chain. The majority of QADEX customers include a modern slavery and ethical risks category within their risk assessments.

Sustainability & agricultural risks are a very extensive and quickly evolving area of risk for all businesses. QADEX risk assessment software customers will often include a basic sustainability category within their supplier and auditor risk assessment. Customers looking to take this to a more advanced level are implementing our STARIndex solution.

Commercial Assessments are a user friendly way within our risk assessment manager software to identify which suppliers present an elevated risk to your business. They may be supplying customised or bespoke products which could take a long time to source from an alternative supplier if the current supplier were no longer able or willing to supply.

Financial Assessments are a category of risk where the QADEX risk assessment software can identify elevated risks of suppliers who are liable to fail financially and thereby disrupt your food supply chain. Financial assessments are often closely related with commercial assessments.

How many steps does a Food Safety Risk Assessment contain?

The steps that QADEX use when implementing our risk assessment software for customers are:

• A consultation process to identify the customer’s preferred approach to assessment. There are multiple different approaches and workflows and the QADEX food safety risk assessment software can be configured for each.
• We review the customer’s marketplace, customer profile, and business strategy to ensure that the assessment being setup is future proof. With many years of experience helping our customers deploy risk management solutions we always find opportunities to improve and transform the process.
• In consultation with the customer, we identify the main categories of risk, as outlined above, and the method statements for completing each category of the assessment.
• We build a pilot version of the risk assessment within the risk assessment software.
• Our customer completes a number of sample assessments within the software.
• The software outputs risk scores and suggested risk controls or risk mitigation based on the configuration which are reviewed by the customer.
• The food software is now live.

How does our Food Safety Risk Assessment software deal with risk reporting?

Risk reporting is fully configurable for each customer, fully configurable reporting dashboards present risk profile dashboards, configured to each type of user from board level, through risk managers, and for general communication wider user groups if necessary.

Is assessing risk a static or ever-changing process?

Assessing risk is an ever-changing process. Many businesses review their assessments at least annually and many QADEX customers update how assessments are completed on an annual basis.