Policy and Objectives

What is a food safety policy?

A food safety policy is your organisation's commitment to providing safe and suitable food. Food safety is important as it helps to protect your consumers from the risk of food borne illnesses. It also helps to prevent consumers from risks of health–related conditions such as allergy and even death.

You business creates its own food safety policy. This involves establishing everything that you will do to ensure food safety in your business' supply chain. This will include the legal obligations and processes which they are legally obliged to meet, as well as the food safety policies which they also want to meet to ensure the utmost food safety in their company.

What is a food safety objective?

Food safety objectives are designed to create goals for your company to track your progress with meeting the food safety policy.

An effective framework to aid in creating those food safety objectives is SMART objectives.

It is important when creating your food safety objectives, that they meet each 5 aspects of SMART objectives.

S - Specific. Include specific data that you are trying to reach

M – Measurable. By having a solid metric, you will be able to definitively measure whether or not you have reached these goals or not.

A – Achievable. It’s important to create goals that are actually achievable for your company.

R – Realistic. This is similar to achievable goals, they must be realistic for your company, not your competitors.

T – Timely. You must have a time-frame for your goals. Do not set them too far in the future, but also set a realistic time frame for achieving your goals.

Why is a food safety policy important?

It is important to implement food safety policy in your business so that you are meeting your legal requirements, but also to ensure you can prove to your customers that you are reaching high standards with your food safety.

Some of the benefits of a food safety policy are:

1. Reduce your spoiled product costs
2. Educated employees
3. Improve company reputation

Learn More: 

• What is a quality policy?
• What is a food safety plan? 
• What is food safety training?