OSI Focuses on Building a Food Safety Culture

September 24, 2020

Ensuring that everyone in the OSI family really gets the importance of producing and selling high quality, safe food is our top priority. Hence why we are dedicated to building a strong positive food safety culture.

It might sound like a dry topic, but ultimately the business reputation hinges on ‘food safety’, which is why we launched the Food Safety and Quality Council in 2011.

FOOD SAFETY WEEK

One of the recent things our Food Safety and Quality Council did in 2018 was launch an OSI annual Food Safety Week. During this week, each plant around the globe, raises the awareness of certain areas of food safety, communicated in engaging ways with board games, posters, raffles and quizzes.

Now COVID has come along, the issues surrounding the pandemic will be part of this year’s Food Safety Week, with a focus on hygiene standards.

MAINTAINING STANDARDS

To keep this topic fresh, while maintaining standards, the Council meets often to identify areas that are going well and recognize any gaps. They also proactively analyze performance data and benchmark this against other OSI sites.

All plants are certified by the Global Food Safety initiative and have routine audits, to ensure sites are conforming to the high standards.

Interactions with our suppliers and ensuring quality control throughout is another area of focus. We have policies in place, which every supplying business must adhere to outlining food safety expectations, which includes foreign material control, high animal welfare standards and excellent biosecurity measures, where appropriate.

Again, to maintain consistency all suppliers must complete third party audits of which food safety is a key component.

This approach to food safety has helped to analyze the data and take the programs to a new level. The council and the innovative ways they have come up with to keep the issue top of mind in our daily work activities have been instrumental and there will be no letting our guard down going forward.