Supplier Quality Assurance: Looking beyond in-house quality assurance and control

The relationship between a food manufacturing company and her raw material supplier(s) is a symbiotic or mutualistic one. They (the company and supplier) need to be on the same wavelength in terms of understanding and implementation of food safety and quality management system for the business relationship to be beneficial and thrive.

I mean, you can't invest time and resources improving your in-house quality assurance and quality control processes as a company, while your supplier is busy delivering unsafe and poor quality raw materials on a month on month basis. So while you're upgrading your processes and procedures, always ensure that your suppliers are doing same at their end to prevent a one-sided approach to quality and food safety management.

This brings us to supplier quality assurance, a system designed to ensure that your suppliers continually deliver quality and safe raw materials that enable you meet your customer requirements. Supplier quality assurance involves (but is not limited to):

1. Supplier selection: This is based on the supplier's ability to meet certain criteria such as ability to deliver safe and quality raw materials consistently that meet declared specifications, in the right quantity, at the right time, for the lowest possible price.
2. Supplier audits: At some point, you're going to have to carry out in-person or virtual audit of your suppliers processes and procedures. This is very crucial as it can help uncover areas of improvement that will in turn improve the quality and safety of product you receive from them in future.
3. Entrance control inspection and tests: There should be a procedure for sampling, inspecting and testing of raw material deliveries from your suppliers to ascertain physical, chemical and microbiological conformance to requirements as well as process/plant suitability and machinability.
4. Supplier performance monitoring: Before reaching a contractual agreement with your suppliers, clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for rating their performance, their target for each KPI and the implication of inability to meet these KPIs should be stated. Important KPIs to consider are defect rate and food safety failure rate.
5. Food safety and quality risk management: What happens when analytical results indicate that the material supplied do not meet food safety or quality specifications? Who will bear the cost? Will the supplier be willing to evacuate the non-conforming consignment and replace with a better quality product? You should be wary of doing business with a supplier who does not want to take responsibility when there is a food safety or quality failure from their end.
6. Complaint handling and issue resolution: How suppliers handle and resolve issues and the turnaround time shows how they value the business relationship and also shows if they are big on continuous improvement. This is also seen in how seriously they take closure of identified gaps during supplier audits.

Dear reader, this months newsletter is a reminder that raw material suppliers and food businesses can create a win-win relationship for both parties. Finally, thank you for sticking with this newsletter for 2 years now and counting. Let's continue sharing knowledge in the fields of food safety, food quality, food manufacturing and food science/technology in 2024. Stay safe out there, until next time! ?

Written and edited by:?@Chidinma Ezinne Ochulor for Let's Talk FOOD! newsletter. Chidinma is a Food Scientist and Technologist, a food safety and quality professional and is certified by CQI/IRCA as a food safety management systems lead auditor.?

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