The difference between food quality control and assurance
Safe food production requires a close eye on quality. This ensures safety for the animals and people consuming it, controls and prevents cases of foodborne diseases, and maintains the balance of value for money at the end of the line.
Food quality control differs from food quality assurance. Both share the same larger goal but are slightly apart in terms of their immediate aims. However, they are equally essential under the umbrella of quality management.
What is food quality control?
Quality control concerns inspection and appraisal of your product. Faults can be identified and rectified before it reaches consumers. It is a process that comes at the end of production and is typically the final check or round of checks before a product goes to market. However, quality control checks are often placed at multiple stages of food production.
Food quality control must address several concerns due to the intrinsic risk of food itself. Food ingestion by animals and people mean that it could either cause physical harm to innards, such as through food metal and glass contaminants, or cause disease through microbes, chemicals like pesticides, or mycotoxins.
The feasible risks to food quality, and therefore the actual form and procedures of quality control, can depend on a number of factors. Different ways that quality challenges can present themselves include:
Ingredients used and their sources, such as produce that may have been treated with pesticides and dairy that needs to be checked for pasteurisation.
Production line and machinery that could shed pieces of metal, oils and greases, or malfunction and mismanage a stage of production such as over/undercooking food.
Human factors like insufficient hygiene or mishandling of workflows leading to contamination or errors.
Additionally, some problems with quality control may occur naturally. Even the most accurate and stringent measures in a production line can allow small mistakes to slip through. Chopped vegetables may still include inedible pieces of vegetation, and pieces of food that are individually coated and packaged together may stick or adhere in a way that makes them trickier to cook for the consumer.
Whilst these are not as serious as problems with safety and hygiene, they can still impact the perceived quality of a product, and so are important to consider as part of quality control.
How to implement best practice quality control
Companies working with food are duty-bound to monitor quality and ensure that their products are safe for the consumer. Fortunately, there are proper procedures to follow that guide the practices of food brands.
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) is a system that addresses food safety as well as quality assurance (more on that later). It is concerned with everything from the biological, chemical, and physical hazards from raw material production and handling to the manufacturing, distribution, and consumption of the final product.
HACCP is a widely used system, adopted across the globe in countries such as the US, Canada, Russia, and the UK. Its standards may be bolstered or combined with specific national guidelines such as those set by the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA).
HACCP provides guidance for different food types such as dairy and seafood. It covers not only the inspection of food products themselves, but the environments in which food is produced and which actions should best be taken.
HACCP guidance for food quality control includes:
Evaluating a business in terms of operation, what hazards might occur in the chain and what risks they might present.
Outline actions that need to be taken to prevent or mitigate these hazards.
Ensuring procedures are followed and records are logged to demonstrate compliance.
Once control points have been established, businesses can then implement the actual measures needed to measure and check for potential hazards to their product.
This could involve microbial testing, to check for any risk of disease or infection; x-ray testing, to check for objects that could be inside of a food product such as bone or indigestible objects swallowed by fish; and physical and visual inspections to determine if a product is damaged, correctly made, or sufficiently cooked.
These tests are useful for late-stage checks, but earlier tests might need to be carried out to confirm that the product is also adhering to requirements such as use of preservatives. Systems to record and analyse the real-time data that quality control checks are aiming to glean may also be essential to properly make use – and prove the existence of – said data.
Benefits of good quality control
Good quality control for food is its own preventative measure. The better and more rigorous your quality control, the less likely a product will go into the hands of consumers carrying risks to health and to brand image.
Food quality control will ensure that even small hazards are more likely to be detected before it is too late. When this is the case, it can prevent costly and time-consuming needs such as having to recall a product that has already sold. Such recalls can be embarrassing for a business and can potentially damage trust for a long time, perhaps even irreversibly.
Official recalls are not the only way that mainstream scrutiny of a brand can turn sour. In the age of social media, consumers can easily share evidence of their finds, which can go viral and end up reaching far and wide.
Food brands that are lax in their quality control can suffer in public opinion as well as facing investigations headed by the FSA’s National Food Crime Unit (NFCU) who will work with law enforcement where necessary. The NFCU formed in 2014, in the wake of the horsemeat scandal that saw a huge blow to public trust in brand involved in both food manufacture and retail.
There have been calls in recent years to give the NFCU ‘more teeth’ when it comes to investigating breaches of the law and pursuing prosecutions, though they are still a crucial part of investigations into food law violations.
Besides the material benefits, good quality control is something of which a business should be proud. It means that customers can enjoy their products without fear from avoidable risks on either side and builds a trustworthy reputation when paired with good customer service.
In short, good quality control builds a solid reputation and avoids costly, time-consuming setbacks resulting from inadequate oversight.
What is food quality assurance?
Food quality assurance is the structural work that supports a business’s quality control efforts. It is the activities and systems that scaffold the viability of food production that remains compliant, hygienic, and of acceptable quality.
Quality assurance ensures that all aspects of food quality including portion size and value for money are meeting the standards of both external bodies and the business itself.
In essence, quality assurance is verified by quality control. The former sets the quality of the product through monitored control, and the latter checks that the actions and systems put in place are indeed working as intended.
It may seem that quality assurance is unnecessary if quality control is in place, but that is not the case. Good quality assurance means that would-be problems are eliminated before they have a chance to arise.
How to implement best practice quality assurance
Quality assurance requires planning and a thorough, 360-degree view of what a business does and how it operates. This means an honest look at hazards and where certain areas are lacking, such as staff hygiene or machine maintenance.
Like with food quality control, HACCP guidance can provide the answers on what to do and how to implement it. A large part of this is to set up critical control points (CCPs), which are stages in production at which an action or process can be applied to control and reduce food safety hazards to acceptable levels.
Auditing the potential hazards within a business can elucidate the necessary next steps to tackle and reduce them. For instance, if there is a risk of contaminants getting into food such as metal or glass, then an x-ray machine or metal detector is the most straightforward and cost-effective solution.
For hazards that involve the possibility of substances getting into food, then chemical testing or visual inspection may be needed at a CCP.
Quality assurance does not just exist in the testing and monitoring of the process. A way of reducing hazards can be to address the equipment that is itself used to create and process the food. Machines may be overdue deep cleaning or maintenance. Alternatively, old equipment may simply be in dire need of an upgrade.
Appraising existing machinery and equipment for faults, worn pieces, or design features that make them difficult to fully clean may reveal areas for improved quality assurance whilst also giving staff better tools to work with. New equipment may even have the added benefit of increasing productivity whilst downsizing hazards.
Benefits of good quality assurance
Good quality assurance means that hazards are being reduced to acceptable levels before quality control is necessary to detect them. This allows production to carry on at normal levels with real-time monitoring, rather than simply finding hazards with quality control passes but having no understanding of where and how the hazards are occurring.
By delving into the quality assurance side of a business, its staff, leaders, and stakeholders can develop a greater awareness of QA processes that build an environment more conducive to upholding internal standards and procedures.
Good quality assurance synergises with good quality control to create a low-risk production environment, informed by real-time data and conscious of the risk of errors so that little to no defects slip through.
Good quality assurance proves that a business is mindful of the hazards presented by its operation and is willing to voluntarily evaluate them to improve processes and make its products safer for customers.
Ultimately, end consumers are the ones who benefit most from food quality assurance and quality control processes that make products more reliable to eat. Modern food production applies to all kinds of products, including those fed to pets and children. Assuring that brands are conscious of hazards and have agreed actions and responses in place is more important than ever.
Quality assurance and control with Calibre Control
The right equipment helps make food quality assurance and control more manageable and straightforward. Calibre Control have a wealth of experience in both vending, and supplying advice on, testing and quality control equipment.
To learn more about how you can establish excellent quality in your food business, please contact us today.