Question

Course: quality assurance in food processing

What are the three types of audits? Please explain the differences between them.

Answer 1

Food safety and quality audits are used widely in the food industry for various reasons (to evaluate management systems, obtain certifications to certain food safety and quality standards, assess the condition of premises and products, confirm legal compliance, and so on). The audit procedure usually incorporates documentation review and conduction of checks and interviews to confirm compliance with a standard. The auditing process may involve the inspection of the whole manufacturing process from a raw material through preparation to dispatch/service and can be very detailed and thorough. Specifically, within the frame of a food safety audit, information about a food business is gathered in order to identify areas of potential improvement in the company's food safety processes and systems. Another purpose of the audits is the identification of areas of the business that present deficiencies in order to implement measures for their correction. Audits are very important tools for maintaining food safety standards and any relevant certification, through enabling transparency and reassuring that standards are being maintained. This transparency can increase the collaborative capacity of stakeholders within the supply chain, and improves safety and efficiency, while promotes the continual improvement within each part of the supply chain. Audits are an essential tool in the process of certifying that proper food safety practices are followed. Food safety audits evaluate conformance to different components such as:

• Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP)
• food safety system standards: Manitoba HACCP Advantage
• industry specific standards and guidelines: Canadian Grain Commission
• food safety management systems: ISO 22000
• customers' specific standard requirements

Many organizations categorize their auditing program into:

(1) external audits, which are audits conducted by a third‐party organization, and

(2) internal audits, which are audits conducted by internal auditors that work for the organization.

Most companies have experience in external auditing processes. These auditing processes involve detailed assessments in which the companies frequently focus principally on passing the audit. This way of approaching external auditing has resulted in the conduction of misunderstood or underutilized internal auditing. Instead of approaching the internal audits as a necessity to pass an external audit, they need to be seen as an important tool of quality management systems (QMSs) that can contribute to the continuous improvement and validation of the food safety systems. Audits can be categorized, based on auditor–auditee relationship, into:

• First‐Party Audits: First-party audits are often called internal audits. This is when someone from the organization itself will audit a process or set of processes in the quality management system to ensure it meets the procedure that the company has specified. This person can be an employee of the organization or someone hired by the organization to perform the internal audits, such as a consultant, but the important thing is that the person is acting on behalf of the company rather than a customer or certification body. This type of audit is focused not only on whether the company processes meet the requirements of a standard, but all rules the company has set for itself. The audit will look for problem areas, areas where processes do not align with each other, opportunities for improvement, and the effectiveness of the quality management system. By design, these audits can and should be much more in depth than the other audits, since this is one of the best ways for a company to find areas to improve upon.
• Second‐Party Audits: A second-party audit is when a company performs an audit of a supplier to ensure that they are meeting the requirements specified in the contract. These requirements may include special control over certain processes (such as soldering or welding), requirements on traceability of parts (knowing which parts are used in which products), requirements for special cleanliness standards, requirements for specific documentation, or any of a host of other items of special interest to that customer. These audits can be done on-site by reviewing the processes or even off-site by reviewing documents submitted by the supplier. The customer can audit all or part of the contract – whatever they see a need to audit. It is important to understand that a second-party audit is between the customer and the supplier and has nothing to do with becoming certified. These audits are useful in selecting new suppliers and evaluating the current ones. These audits assess the effectiveness of suppliers' food safety systems in providing safe food or ingredients.
• Third‐Party Audits: A third-party audit occurs when a company has decided that they want to create a quality management system (QMS) that conforms to a standard set of requirements and hire an independent company to perform an audit to verify that the company has succeeded in this endeavor. These independent companies are called certification bodies or registrars, and they are in the business of conducting audits to compare and verify that the QMS meets all the requirements of the chosen standard, and continues to meet the requirements on an ongoing basis. They then provide certification to companies that they approve. This can be used to give customers of the certified company confidence that the QMS meets the requirements of the chosen standard. There are three types of audits used in this process, called certification audits, maintenance or surveillance audits, and re-certification audits. So, in brief companies uses third party audits for several reasons, including:
• satisfy customer requirements
• improve their competitive position
• recognition in the form of a certificate