Training
Getting safe food to our customers requires that our employees be familiar with best practices and capable of meeting our strict food safety requirements. To this end, all employees undergo extensive training in food safety policies and procedures—tailored to each of Smithfield’s companies—to keep our foods safe. Each worker is trained upon hiring and is retrained on a regular basis, depending on his or her job requirements.
In order to foster continuous improvement in food safety, the food safety teams constantly look for new ways to incorporate emerging food safety innovations into our products and processes. The team also regularly presents scientific papers at national conferences and attends educational seminars, professional meetings, and regulatory meetings, using the latest techniques they’ve learned to train other employees.
Auditing and Inspections
Our European operations comply with strict European Union Food Safety Standards. Each facility is subject to a variety of inspections and audits, as follows:
- All Global Food Safety Initiative and/or ISO 22000:2005 systems must pass annual third-party audits.
- Each facility conducts regular mock product recalls (also called product tracing exercises) that are supervised by food safety professionals. In these exercises, facility staff must locate and collect 99.9 percent of affected food products within four hours.
- Some of our larger customers send their own food safety officials to audit our plants.
- Government officials frequently inspect our facilities and products.
- Plant personnel conduct regular internal audits throughout the year.
Any nonconformance identified by any internal or external audit is addressed promptly at each facility. Three to four months after the initial audit, facility staff members conduct a follow-up audit to ensure that all issues have been resolved.
All European processing facilities also conduct a variety of tests as part of their food safety programs, including microbiological counts and hygiene tests. Raw materials and finished products are also evaluated.
