About Official Food Safety

PPECB is the assignee of the Department of Agriculture(DoA) to ensure compliance to the Quality Standards and Food Safety Standards under the APS Act.

This Food Safety Standard:  "Standards Regarding Food Hygiene and Food Safety of Regulated Agricultural Food Products of Plant Origin Intended for Export" was promulgated by the DoA on the 13th of May 2005.

These standards require that food products are handled under hygienic conditions through all stages of the supply chain, from primary production to the point of export.  All off-farm Food Business Operators (FBO's) will be required to apply to principles of HACCP(Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) along the entire food supply chain.

These standards and regulations also require record keeping, and that FBO's are able to recall or withdraw product from anywhere in the trade chain, should it pose a health risk.

The audit requirements of the hygiene and food safety standard has had a huge facelift since it’s promulgation in the first part of the 2005 year.  On the list of achievements, amongst other was the establishment of a Food Safety Technical Working Group (TWG).

This group, a subset of the Official Food Safety Forum of the Department of Agriculture, is constituted by two members of industry, a member of the Department of Agriculture (DoA) and a member of the Perishable Export Control Board (PPECB), was originally formed in 2005 to develop a Risk profile for the subsequent use in auditing of the system.  Since the terms of reference for the group expanded to:

• the determination of food safety risk factors to be included in the compliance requirements to be audited by the PPECB as assignee of the DoA
• regularly, or when deemed necessary, review the food safety compliance criteria and checklists per Food Business Operator (FBO) type
• develop and review the compliance process to the food and hygiene standard
• continuously align the system with international requirements, customizing it to the South African scenario.

A recent review of the compliance requirements to the food safety standards by the TWG were done, and will become mandatory for compliance by FBO’s as of 1 August 2007.

These major changes to the system include the:

• re-visiting of the scope of each FBO type,
• re-visiting of the risk of commercial systems and the subsequent temporary dispensation of FBO’s with these systems from the official system.  A compliance grid has been developed for this purpose,
• development of a compliance process, whereby non-complying FBO’s has to act on non-conformances within a specified time period, and the subsequent stopping of exports if these requirements are not adhered to,
• streamlining of checklists and compliance criteria to only include food safety requirements,
• standardization of checklists and compliance criteria in terms of structure and layout,
• addition of sections for traceability and product withdrawal.  Relevant areas for vital record-keeping and links with special market programmes have been indicated in the compliance criteria,
• identification of CRITICAL, MAJOR and MINOR risk areas for food safety.  Here the TWG determined the risk of the process and built it in to the compliance requirements.  A system was divided around these areas, and specific corrective action requirements to each of them prescribed.
• A provision was built in for FBO’s to draw up an action plan for implementation of the corrective action within given time periods.

For Food Business Operators (FBO’s) to comply with the Food Safety Standard, a set of documents have been compiled to assist with implementation and auditing of the system.  All of these documents can be found on the Department of Agriculture (DoA) website (www.nda.agric.za/foodsafety):

• A checklist and compliance criteria per FBO type. (Revision April 2007, for implementation as of 1 August 2007).
• Primary production and on-farm produce handling
• Off-farm produce handling
• Processing facilities
• Cold storage facilities
• Container depot facilities
• Road transport operators
• Grain storage facilities (Current revision – July 2006, to be revised shortly).
• “Food Safety compliance process” – addressing non-conformances.
• “Commercial system compliance grid” – commercial certificates acceptable for consideration of FBO’s as a low risk.
• “Traceability guideline” to be used for guidance to implementation of the traceability sections in the checklist.

These documents can be found on the Department of Agriculture website:  http://www.nda.agric.za