Under the guidelines of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), any company regulated by the FDA that packs, manufacturers, holds, or processes food must have a food safety plan.
But the regulations don’t stop there. The food safety plan must also be created and implemented by a certified Preventive Controls Qualified Individual (PCQI). This person doesn’t need to be an employee of the company - but they do need to complete the required PCQI training.
PCQI training courses can be expensive and take over 20 hours. A company may balk at pursuing this expense, but here are five reasons why PCQI training is so crucial for food companies.
Primarily, your company should pursue PQQI training for the person who will prepare and run your food safety program because it is a regulatory demand of FSMA.
According to the FDA, the consequences for a firm that does not comply with FSMA preventive controls can include:
The best way to avoid these consequences is to invest in PCQI training.
Designing and implementing a food safety plan is one of the critical functions of a PCQI. Through PCQI training, a learner should gain a deep understanding of how to build a robust and risk-based food safety plan and how to put it into operation. PCQI training covers a wide range of subjects that provide the knowledge to build a food safety plan. Some of these topics include:
A 2010 paper describes food safety culture as the aggregated values, attitudes, and beliefs that affect hygiene behaviors in a food handling environment. According to the FDA, “a strong food safety culture is a prerequisite to effective food safety management.”
Learning is absolutely key to building a food safety culture. PCQI training, like HACCP training or cGMP courses, help bolster the food safety knowledge of employees and teach them the best practices to apply this knowledge during the workday.
The expertise that a PCQI attains through the courseware heightens their awareness of a wide variety of critical food safety principles.
PCQI training provides a comprehensive understanding of hazard analysis and the preventive controls necessary to prevent or mitigate food safety hazards. PCQI training provides the know-how to build robust food safety plans that not only help prevent recalls and contamination outbreaks but also help companies meet other compliance tasks. PCQI training also guides learners on the principles of monitoring and verification procedures, which can be key for the supervision of regulatory actions in the workplace.
In addition, when an audit of a food manufacturing facility happens, being able to prove to inspectors that you have completed PCQI training can help boost trust and indicate how seriously your facility treats food safety.
For individual food industry professionals, a certificate of completion for PCQI training can serve as a powerful credential for career advancement. It shows that an industry professional was trusted by a former employer or manufacturing facility to take the lead on learning and applying these crucial guidelines. It indicates that someone has studied some of the more crucial subjects in food safety and shown enough proficiency to attain a certificate of completion. Finally, it indicates to potential employers that the learner went above and beyond the minimum requirements of the industry and attained a deep, comprehensive education on a subject of great importance to food safety.
PCQI training is an essential component of running a successful food safety plan. No company can afford to overlook this obligation.