Tactics
Maple Leaf
Maple Leaf’s tactics in supporting its four strategies – sanitation protocols, testing, training, and food safety leadership included the following:
Strategy: Sanitation protocols
- Daily sanitization procedures to seek, find, and destroy bacteria
- Changed traffic patterns to minimize risk of cross-contamination, including color coding employees by coats designating where they can travel
- Disassembling and sanitizing parts of slicing equipment, including boiling and baking parts
- Physical improvement to walls, ceilings, floors, drains, airflow, and controls for condensation
- Run plants at consistently cooler temperatures to inhibit bacteria growth
- Adding shrouds, sleeves, and aprons to entry requirements
Strategy: Testing
- Strengthened sample, testing, and data analysis
- Doubled testing sites and number of samples on every line in the ready-to-eat plant
- Review testing samples separately and as a whole
- Has two government accredited testing labs and will soon have a third
Strategy: Training
- Wrote new protocol into standard operating procedure
- Thousands of hours spent by employees learning new procedures
Strategy: Food safety leadership
- Created position of Chief Food Safety Officer (CFSO) currently held by Dr. Randall Huffman
- CFSO identifies global best practices in food safety and new food safety technologies
- Developed food safety advisory council consisting of global experts in food safety, food microbiology, and food science
- CFIA inspectors are on site to monitor all food processing at all Maple Leaf processing facilities
- All plants are federally registered
- An independent company reviews proficiency of Maple Leaf microbiology testing three times a year
- Turnstile entry restricts access to ready-to-eat plants until bio-secure hand washing and sanitization is complete
- Participates in annual food safety audits
- Performs quarterly exercises to test ability to trace product through the supply chain
Joi Chadwick Did This: 