Clause 4.2 – Understanding the needs and expectations of interested parties - is an important one and sets up your system information going forward. The details of your interested parties can drive everything from improvement to guiding management of change. While Clause 4.1 Understanding the organisation and its context is technically first, 4.2 gives you a much wider understanding of all aspects that affect your organisation and where it sits.
This is the reason it's at the start of the standard before you get into all the nitty gritty of day-to-day operations. If you don't have a good understanding of your interested parties and how they interact with your business, it can set you up for bad decision making and creating a lot of noise that you really don't need!
What Are Interested Parties?
The aim of Clause 4.2 in regard to ISO 22000 (and FSSC of course!) is to make sure that the business has a good understanding of how your operations affect the food safety requirements of external and internal parties, what impact they have on them and the risks and opportunities inherent depending on who you interact with.
There's a whole host of options to consider, here are some examples and why they are there:
- Employees – hygienic working environment, training in how to do their job to the standard required, understand their place in the food safety management system and how they contribute
- Regulators – expect you to meet those relevant regulations to food safety, operate within the law, communicate when there are issues, have public safety top of mind
- Suppliers – ability to plan and regulate your orders within expected lead time parameters to ensure they can deliver raw materials/ingredients safely, communicate clearly and fairly when there are issues/concerns regarding food safety
- Customers – meet your contractual obligations and also potentially unspoken requirements re food safety, communicate when there are issues, and quickly and effectively deal with them, be fair and reasonable in your dealings with them, confidentiality
- Markets – produce a food safe product, communicate when there are issues
- Shareholders – responsible management of business including food safety
- Community – public safety, responsible business management regarding food safety
It's a lot to think about, but every single one has the ability to positively and negatively affect, and be affected by, what you do.
Once you have that list, you then need to consider what expectations those interested parties have of you.
This is a key area in all ISO standards and for good reason, so make sure you spend quality time with a wide range of your team members to draft up this list, to make sure it's as accurate and in depth as possible.
How To Record and Review
While the standard doesn't specify the documentation required, something like a reference table is the easiest way to lay out the information in a way that's simple to read and understand. An example is as below:
| Interested
Party | Interest | Impact | Needs/Expectations | Actions
Req'd |
| Community | Low | Med | Public
safety | Follow
FSMS, meet regulations, communicate issues |
| Regulators | High | High | Meet
regulations, public safety | Comply with
corrective notices, inspection Communicate issues |
| Employees | High | High | Hygienic
working environment, clear information, training | Training
plan and implementation, clear communication of requirements |
| Customers | High | High | Good
food safety management, clear communication when issues | Follow
and manage FSMS, recall policy and trials, meet regulations |
By taking the time to populate this information well, you should be able to not only clearly understand who is impacted by your Food Safety Management System, and how, but also create plans on what you need to do to manage or mitigate those impacts.
Other Areas of Impact
Keep in mind, when you then start developing other areas, for example a SWOT analysis or building your risk management, all of those interested parties will come into play. They will definitely have some relationship with a risk that needs to be managed and have controls in place for your food safety program.
The other side of the coin is when you want to make changes to your Food Safety Management System. Good change management should take into account the impact it will have on not just your business but also any of the interested parties on your list.
It will drive questions you need to consider as part of the change. i.e. will this change contravene regulation requirements, will it negatively affect customers food safety expectations, do we need to communicate the change to market? And so on.
It's critical information that the whole team can refer back to many times during their work with your FSMS, and should be maintained well to support this usage. It will require ongoing review and updating as things change in the market, by law etc. It's easy to forget this when facing the daily grind which is where a system like Mango can help. Mango can alert you when it's time to review your interested parties and can track when you do it and any changes you need to make. You can keep also track of all those food safety objectives that you will need to set up to ensure you are doing what you have said you will do.
Of course, another bonus of this is the ability to demonstrate all to anyone who wants to audit or understand it.
So, book out some time, work with your team and start populating your interested parties!
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