Food Watch digital Platform developed by Dubai Municipality food control department reduced the grandiose challenge of the food companies to implement food safety management systems like HACCP, ISO 22000, FSSC & BRC. All food safety management system comprises PRPs, policies, procedures (process based and specific standard based) and HACCP plan, its verification and trend analysis.
Let us check how it supports the implementation of HACCP & ISO 22000:2018 and how we can work out this hassle free. The system helps for the easy obtaining of lay out approval and permits and we can verify evidence from the system. With pest control, waste, sewage disposal and supporting services, selection of best service provider, approval and evaluation can be done through food watch. All the service providers must be registered in food watch system. The system provides evidence and supporting documents. It does not require maintaining separate physical paper records.
Selection of supplier, approval and assessment can also be done through food watch. Instead of visiting/ auditing the supplier and frequently following up with them for securing the self-assessment questionnaire, we can easily collect the evidence and supporting documents through the system. This can save a lot of time.
We should update each Material receiving in the food watch system. So evidence for acceptance, rejection and its trend analysis can be collected easily. This will ease the traceability test.
Fitness for work, illness status, Occupational health card details need to be updated in food watch. We can get evidence and trend analysis data through the system.
Product information/consumer awareness should be updated in the food watch system. It makes ease for the customer. We can get evidence for measuring and monitoring data of all the major /critical operations, machine and temperature information from food watch, when we update the same. If in case any food poisoning incident reported, it is easy to conduct the investigation & frequent traceability test. Traceability details of each product can be obtained through the food watch system.
Some other features of the system are daily food safety check can give the precise information about the compliance and condition of the premise.
Competency & awareness of the staff can be monitored and verified through the platform. For continuous improvement of the food safety system, trend analysis of non-conformities from suppliers, service providers like pest control, process or production, customers can be figured out in the system.
Eventhough the system features many options like we discussed above there are some limitations too in the current version. There are no arrangements for adding the management review meeting details & outputs, set objectives of the company for the continual improvement, and its evaluation report and laboratory analysis data. Undoubtedly we can estimate that these provisions will be included in subsequent updates.