Alright, so let me tell you about this whole 3rd party food safety audit thing we just went through. It’s always a barrel of laughs, not really.
Getting Ready (or Panicking)
It usually starts with an email. You know, the one that drops into your inbox saying, “Your audit is scheduled for…” and then your stomach just sinks. First thing we did was call a massive meeting. Everyone starts pointing fingers, “Did you check this?”, “Is that up to date?”. It’s organized chaos, mostly chaos.
We spent like, a solid week, maybe more, just running around. I was in charge of checking all the sanitation logs. Fun times. You find out who’s been slacking, real quick. We had to:
- Double-check every single temperature log for the fridges and freezers.
- Make sure all the cleaning schedules were signed off.
- Hunt down calibration certificates for thermometers. Those things love to disappear.
- And the paperwork! Oh my god, the mountains of paperwork. Policies, procedures, training records… endless.
Every surface got an extra scrub, every label was scrutinized. You basically try to make the place look like a surgical theater, even though you know it’ll be back to normal messy by next week.
The Big Day Arrives
Then the auditor shows up. This time it was a lady, looked pretty serious. You try to be all smiles and offer them coffee, but inside you’re just hoping they don’t look too closely in that one corner you forgot about.
She started with the paperwork, of course. Flipping pages, asking questions. “Show me your pest control records.” “What’s your allergen control program?” It’s like an interrogation, but with clipboards. Then came the walk-around. She poked into everything. Checked the hand wash stations, peered into drains, watched staff like a hawk. I swear she had X-ray vision for out-of-date spices.
You just follow them around, nodding, trying to answer questions without sounding like you’re making it up on the spot. Even when you know you’re doing things right, it’s stressful. You just wait for them to find something, because they always find something.
This Whole Audit Business…
You know, these audits. They say it’s all for safety, and I get it, nobody wants to poison customers. But sometimes, man, it feels like a giant box-ticking exercise. This one time, years ago, at a different place I worked, we had this auditor… let’s call him Mr. Grumbles. He was ancient, been doing it forever. He found a cobweb. One tiny cobweb, high up in a corner of the dry storage room that probably hadn’t been disturbed since the place was built.
You’d think we’d committed a cardinal sin. He went on and on about “potential contaminants” and “lack of diligence.” My manager at the time, poor guy, was sweating bullets. We almost failed the audit because of that damn cobweb. It was nuts. We spent the next day on ladders with vacuum cleaners, going over every square inch of the ceiling.
It makes you wonder, right? Like, how much of this is truly about making food safer, and how much is just… procedure for procedure’s sake? I remember my uncle, he ran a small bakery. Old school. Clean as a whistle, best bread in town. He dreaded these things. Said it took him away from actually baking. He eventually sold the place. Said the paperwork got to be more work than the dough. Can’t say I blame him sometimes.
This whole audit thing, it’s a whole industry in itself. And the pressure it puts on small businesses, or even bigger ones like ours… it’s immense. People’s jobs can be on the line if things go badly. I saw one guy, a good worker, nearly lose it because he’d mislabeled a couple of things during a rush. The auditor picked up on it, and suddenly it’s a “systemic failure in labeling protocol.” Come on. It was a busy Tuesday.
The Aftermath
So, after hours of poking and prodding, we had the closing meeting. That’s where they lay it all out. “We found a minor non-conformance here, an observation there…” This time, thankfully, it wasn’t too bad. A few things to tighten up, mostly paperwork inconsistencies (surprise, surprise) and one cracked tile we somehow missed.
Then you get the official report a few days later. A nice, thick document detailing all your shortcomings. And then the real fun begins: corrective actions. More meetings, more paperwork, assigning tasks, setting deadlines. You have to prove you’ve fixed everything they found.
It’s a cycle, really. You bust your butt to pass, you fix the stuff, then you try to maintain it until the next email drops announcing the next audit. But hey, at least we passed. That’s the main thing. For now, we can breathe a little. Until next time.