Food Safety Management: Chapter 22. Principles and Systems for Quality and Food Safety Management

Principles, management systems and certification schemes around food safety and quality are discussed. Hygiene, prevention and risk reduction, reliability, consistency, traceability, customer and consumer relevance, and transparency and accountability are the driving principles. They are operationalized through various management systems, some of them originating from the food industry, like HACCP, and some from other areas of industry, like 6 Sigma, quality function deployment and total productive maintenance. Certification schemes typically combine and package elements from various systems to fit the needs of a particular type of industry, and always represent a compromise between specificity and broad applicability. Moving forward, we may expect an ongoing drive to develop certification schemes around existing systems, to widen the applicability of existing schemes and to have the entire food supply chain covered by certification schemes.