Quality management in food businesses: beyond the checklist

Walk into almost any food plant of reasonable size and you will find a binder, or a shelf of them. There is a hazard analysis, a list of critical control points, monitoring sheets signed every hour, a quality manual and perhaps a framed certificate in the front office. All of that matters. But anyone who has worked on a plant floor knows two plants can hold identical binders and run very differently. One catches problems early and fixes their causes. The other fills in the forms and keeps having the same problems.

This page traces where modern quality management ideas came from, explains the main systems used in food businesses, and looks at what separates a plant with good paperwork from a plant with good quality.

A short history in order

Statistics on the factory floor

The idea that quality can be managed with numbers goes back to the 1920s, when Walter Shewhart, working for the Bell telephone system, developed control charts to tell ordinary variation in a process apart from variation with a specific cause. A process in statistical control can be improved by changing the system. A process out of control needs someone to find what changed.

Japan after the war

W. Edwards Deming, an American statistician, lectured to Japanese engineers and managers in 1950 at the invitation of the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. A quality prize in his name was set up in Japan the following year. Joseph Juran, whose Quality Control Handbook appeared in 1951, visited Japan in 1954 and stressed that quality is a management responsibility, not only a matter for inspectors. Both men argued, in different ways, that most quality problems come from the system that managers design rather than from careless workers.

Total quality management

When Japanese manufacturers won market share in the 1970s and 1980s, North American firms looked harder at these ideas. The label total quality management, or TQM, came into wide use in the 1980s. It covers a family of practices rather than a single method: focus on the customer, measurement of processes, continuous improvement in small steps, involvement of all staff and close work with suppliers.

HACCP in food safety

Food safety took its own route. In the 1960s the Pillsbury Company, working with NASA and US Army laboratories, needed food for astronauts that was close to certain to be safe. Testing finished products could not give that certainty, because testing destroys what it samples. The answer was to analyse the hazards at each step and control the points where they could be prevented. The approach, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, was presented to the wider food industry in 1971.

HACCP spread slowly at first, then quickly in the 1990s. The Codex Alimentarius Commission adopted guidelines for applying HACCP in 1993. The United States made HACCP mandatory for seafood processors and then for meat and poultry plants later in the decade. In Canada, the federal inspection system encouraged HACCP in federally registered plants through the Food Safety Enhancement Program.

ISO 9000

The International Organization for Standardization published the ISO 9000 series of quality management standards in 1987 and revised it in 1994. ISO 9000 does not say what quality a product must have. It sets out what a management system must contain: documented procedures, records, internal audits, corrective action and management review. Independent registrars audit firms and issue certificates, which many buyers came to request from their suppliers.

The systems compared

Why the certificate is not the quality

A certificate shows that, on the days the auditor visited, the plant had a documented system and followed it. That is useful evidence. It does not show that the people running the line understand what they are measuring, that problems are reported rather than hidden, or that managers act on what the records say.

Three gaps come up again and again:

• Forms that are filled in but never read. Hourly checks get signed, but nobody looks for trends until a customer complains.
• Corrective action that treats symptoms. A product is reworked or held, but the cause, a worn part or a confusing instruction, stays in place.
• Quality as a department. Production staff see quality as the inspectors' job, and inspectors see production as the problem.

The early quality writers would have recognised all three. Their remedy was less about forms and more about how people inside the organisation talk to each other. A shared sense of what the product is for, and of who the customer is, gives meaning to the numbers. Regular conversations between shifts, between the line and the office, and between the plant and its suppliers turn records into decisions.

A worked example in a meat plant

The figures below are round and illustrative. The plant is invented.

An illustrative sausage plant runs two shifts and ships 40 tonnes a week. It has a sound HACCP plan and an ISO 9000 certificate. Metal detection is a critical control point, and every hour an operator passes a test piece through the detector and signs the sheet.

Over a quarter, the plant rejects about 1.5 per cent of production for casing breaks and weight problems, roughly 7.8 tonnes. At an illustrative $5 per kilogram in lost value and rework, that is $39,000 a quarter. None of these rejects is a safety failure, so the HACCP records look clean.

The plant manager starts a short meeting at each shift change: what went wrong, what was tried, what the next shift should watch. Within weeks, operators link most casing breaks to one stuffing machine after cleaning, when settings are restored from memory instead of from a set card. A laminated setting card and a two-minute check after cleaning cut rejects to 0.8 per cent. The saving, about $18,000 a quarter on these numbers, comes from a conversation, not from a new form.

The binder did not cause the problem, and it did not solve it. It recorded the rejects. People talking to each other about why they happened did the rest.

The lesson for food businesses

Quality systems are tools for people who already care about getting things right. Where that care exists, HACCP and ISO 9000 give it structure and evidence. Where it does not, they produce paperwork. Buyers who rely on certificates alone may be buying assurance about the system and not about the product.

Supplier relationships carry the same lesson: a supplier's quality is best judged by how it responds to a problem, not by the certificate on its wall. More on how farms, processors and retailers work together on quality is gathered on the value chain hub and under value chains, and longer readings are listed on the papers shelf.