Issue 9 of the BRCGS Global Food Safety Standard highlights the importance of a site’s commitment to “continuous improvement.”

This makes it more important than ever to be setting positive goals for your food factory, striving for excellence in every area and eliminating risks wherever possible.

The following article highlights five opportunities to drive standards of food safety at your food production site. It also explores the ways in which Retreeva Global could be helping you to achieve this goal.

An effective Colour-Coding Policy is essential to food safety. This policy should be as simple as possible – easy for your operatives to understand and implement. It should also have the potential to grow alongside your site, with options available if you decide to introduce new products and ingredients. With this in mind, Retreeva Global supplies
Regular Ink Pens and Gel Ink Pens in blue, red, green, and yellow housings. As with many of the other pens in the Retreeva range, these retractable designs are available in your choice of black, blue, green, and red ink. They also feature a dominant top button and large window, helping your team to quickly identify the pen they need.

From lightweight materials that reduce the risk of strain and injury to durable materials that stand the test of time in the harshest of conditions, it is essential that the equipment at your site has been made with a food factory in mind. This is especially important when it comes to food safety, which is why you need to prioritise equipment that is food contact approved.

To help you achieve this goal, Retreeva Global pens are made using FDA food-contact-approved materials. This unique housing is also shatterproof and extremely durable, reducing the risk of a foreign body incident caused by small pieces of broken pen entering into a product.

The next step is to explore the benefits of Detectable Equipment. Depending on the risk levels at your food factory, you might decide that it is pertinent to use equipment suited to multiple forms of detection. For example, Retreeva Global pens are metal and x-ray detectable. This is also true of a lot of the Detectable Stationery within the Retreeva range. In addition to this, all of our pens and equipment, aside from the Stainless Steel clipboard, are available in blue – widely considered the colour that is most easy to identify through visual detection. Whatever form it takes, the use of Detectable Equipment should have a significant impact of the food safety standards at your site.

Although detectable equipment will help to reduce the risk of food safety incidents, Retreeva Global believes in the ethos of ‘Prevention before Detection’ – eliminating unnecessary risks before an issue occurs, instead of relying solely on detection after the fact. Your site can embrace this ethos in a number of ways. For example, Retreeva Global pens contain the minimum number of small component parts and, as mentioned above, they are made from a material that does not shatter under duress. It is also worth noting that the Retreeva range features Retractable Detectable Pens that have a unique cartridge suspension which provides a firm writing experience without the need for a metal spring.

Risk assessments are a brilliant way to improve food safety standards at your factory, as they give you an opportunity to identify the vulnerable areas of your operation. But once you have identified these areas, what is the next step? At this point, you should try to find innovative solutions that could reduce or even eliminate food safety risks. Whether it’s a Stapleless Stapler that resolves the safety concerns surrounding traditional metal staples or the built-in pocket clips and lanyard loops on certain Retreeva Global pens, there are plenty of options to explore. You will then be able to present these changes to customers and auditors as an example of your site’s commitment to continuous improvement.