Safefood calls for better food safety training

Safefood, the Food Safety Promotion Board, says a shortage of technical expertise is preventing food manufacturing plants from achieving the highest standards in food safety policy.

The Research into HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) systems published by safefood looked at safety systems of food production companies in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland.

The findings were launched today in Dublin. The research found 95% of companies do have a formal food safety policy, which was generally well communicated to staff.

It also found staff monitoring the critical control points of the food safety system performed well, with 95% understanding their role and their importance in the HACCP system.

Despite these positive baseline findings, the study found shortcomings in the areas of training and verification schedules.

A lack of formal training was believed to be responsible for many of the deficiencies in HACCP systems. The study found that 16% of team leaders and 24% of team members within food production plants had no formal training in HACCP food safety systems.

The majority of companies did not perform well in the area of verification. This means that a constant audit of the HACCP plan is conducted, including sampling and checking data trends.

48% did not have an appropriate verification procedure in place, while 23% of the verification auditors were not trained. Safefood stressed that these results were not a cause for alarm, but did indicate areas which could be improved upon.

Safefood has produced a number of workshops designed to address the deficiencies highlighted in this report with the first of theses taking place in Dublin today.

Dr Thomas Quigley, Director of Science & Technical, safefood said: "This is the first study of this kind in Europe and it is expected that there will be European-wide interest in the study with other countries following suit in benchmarking HACCP implementation."