Software tools launched to help SME’s meet food safety requirements
Food Mapper, Food DefenseTQ and Food SafetyTQ, launched this month, help manage threats and risks associated with production, processing, transportation, distribution and retail sales of food, said the firm.
The technology is a “Yes/No” perpetual, self-evaluation assessment, which can be filled out by different facility personnel, such as quality managers, to determine safe food environments.
Aim to help SME's
Bruce Becker, vice president of marketing and sales at FoodQuestTQ, told FoodProductionDaily.com the aim was to help small to medium enterprises.
“They are the ones that don’t have the depth of staff or resources for all the FSMA [Food Safety Modernization Act] requirements.
“Most of us here have worked in the food business for a long time. We saw this need and wanted to do something about it," he said.
“We are in discussions with insurance companies to reduce the premiums and are getting near a deal.”
Becker added that he didn’t know of any other tools providing the same service.
“Our system provides constant updates through something called poison, if a certain aspect is striking there will be more emphasis put on that in regards to the new information being learned.”
Poison is a data repository that is constantly searching current and past contamination event and key food safety information.
Software details
Food Mapper is a searchable data repository of federal and state regulations and standards, covering 11 US government agencies, with 30 divisions at the federal level, with statutory and regulatory authority over different aspects of the food industry.
Food DefenseTQ is used to conduct assessments of all food defense areas of security concern.
Food SafetyTQ is used for assessments of areas of food safety concern such as accidental food poisonings, equipment malfunction leading to food adulteration, food recalls and other events.
An individual licence for one user costs $300 and can be purchased at the National Food Protection Collaboratory Portal (NFPC).
Dr. John Hnatio, chief science officer, said: “Based on science and the core principles of risk management we’ve combined science and risk-based principles with intense computer analytics to quantitatively derive risk values that benchmark the performance of risk management programs at food operations, including food defense and food safety systems.”
