Are your approved supplier HACCP certificates current?

Week 3 – Food Safety HACCP Challenge

Welcome to Week 3 of the HACCP Mentor Food Safety HACCP Challenge.  This challenge involves an activity that a lot of food businesses find very hard to keep on top of. The key to success is having a good plan of attack and being organised.

The Challenge

This week’s #FSHChallenge is to review all of your approved supplier HACCP certificates to see if they are current.  It is a requirement of the majority of GFSI standards that your suppliers are approved.  As part of this approval process, food businesses may rely on their supplier having 3rd party certification to a recognised HACCP food safety standard.  To evidence their certification, the supplier would provide you with a copy of their HACCP certificate.

How to do it

Step 1: Print off a copy of your Approved Supplier List

Step 2: For each of your approved suppliers, check that you have a copy of their HACCP certificate on file.

Step 3: Go through each of your certificates and check that they are not expired.  All certificates should have and expiry date listed on them.

Step 4: If you find that an approved supplier’s certificate has expired, contact them to get an updated HACCP certificate sent to you. You can also check out the approved supplier’s website and see if they have a copy published for you to download.

 

HACCP-Mentor-Supplier-certificate

Organisation is Key for HACCP Certificates

If you food business has lots and lots of suppliers, this process can be difficult to manage if you don’t have a good notification system in place.  By this I mean, some type of alert or document that quickly tells you if a HACCP certificate has expired.

The system that I use for my food safety consultancy clients is a simple excel spreadsheet which records the approved supplier details and their certification details. When a HACCP certificate has expired or it is close to expiry, the certificate expiry date changes colour.  This makes for a very quick and visual alert for me to start chasing their HACCP certificates.

The following video gives you step by step instructions on how to do this.

How to set up a colour alert system using Excel

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Feedback

Let me know how you went with this Food Safety HACCP Challenge. How do you organise your 3rd party HACCP certificates for your suppliers? Share your method with the HACCP Mentor community.  Don’t forget to share this challenge or your results using the hashtag #FSHChallenge on Twitter and Instagram.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

2 thoughts on “Are your approved supplier HACCP certificates current?”

  1. This topic has been a prickly pear for us, so your information and guidance could not have come at a better time. – I really appreciate you taking the time and effort to send out these challenges and providing all the relevant information that you do. Your website is a wonderful resource, especially for companies that do not have a lot of resources.

    1. Thanks so much Lee for your comment. I am glad that you are enjoying the #FSHChallenge and it is helping you to make your business better. One of the main reasons I started this site was to help people involved in the QA / food safety space who are tight on resources. Thanks again!

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