Food quality plans help meet demand, maintain quality certifications

Consumers expect their food to be safe, and there are methodologies like HACCP, FSMA, FSIS, etc., to ensure that it is. If there is a possibility of a food contaminant, that product will be recalled to ensure the health and well-being of consumers. Quality is a bit of a different story. But it’s just as important when it comes to consumer expectations.

Scott C. Lane, CFS, food safety trainer/food safety and quality plan consultant at Eagle Tower Inc., explains it this way: “If a product fully complies with FDA or USDA regulations, and there are no food safety hazards, but the overall quality of an established product declines, so will its customer demand. When it comes to food quality, a brand name or company’s reputation can quickly become tarnished, or worse, become valueless [if quality declines].”
 

If the quality of a product or ingredient is known—or has usually been known—to be a reliably high, then anything else will be perceived to be inferior, he says. For instance, he says to imagine that your favorite chocolate bar was always made with high quality chocolate and cocoa butter that melted in your mouth. Now suppose that same chocolate bar is being made with cheap chocolate mixed with some carob powder, and the cocoa butter was replaced with coconut or palm oil.

“The quality of the chocolate bar and taste would be totally different; it would be like night and day,” Lane says. “Not only did the food quality of the product change, but your recollection of the quality of the brand has now changed, and not for the good.”

Like HACCP for a food safety plan, a food quality plan follows similar methodologies to help ensure that food processors are meeting their own companies’ quality specifications, as well as their customers’ expectations. 

A food safety plan “defines a program of controls to reduce the risk of quality threats or nonconformances, the methods and responsibilities of those control measures, proper documentation, and what corrective actions should be implemented if nonconformance occurs,” says Jack Teague, implementation specialist, CAT Squared.