This month, we’re excited to be rolling out our brand new Cranswick Manufacturing Standard across the Group.
Our Group Technical team, headed up by Jackie Carter, our Group Technical Director, is responsible for supplier approval. This team maintains technical integrity covering meat, ingredients, packaging services and animal welfare. This is crucial to ensure rigorous rigorous supplier, farm and internal factory audits, creating raw material specifications, risk assessing the supply chain for food fraud and training and advisory services.
Whilst technical excellence has always guided us here at Cranswick, this new Cranswick Manufacturing Standard introduces a consistent approach to quality management systems across the group:
It not only complies with BRCGS and major retailer standards but also includes requirements that we feel are best practice to consolidate our industry-leading position.
This is the first manufacturing standard of its kind to incorporate Health and Safety, Environment, and Energy requirements with food safety.
To support the introduction of the standard, the Group Compliance and Sustainability team have implemented a new internal audit system with an innovative approach to auditing that allows auditors to look at management systems holistically rather than each area in isolation. By challenging systems in this way, the site and the auditor can assess how these systems interact with each other. Where issues have been identified, the extent of the issue can be established allowing for more robust preventative measures to be implemented.
Active Intelligence audits have also been added to the internal audit programme. The scope of these audits can be based on anything ranging from emerging issues and adverse trends to gap analysis against new customer requirements. These audits can be requested by Directors, Divisional Technical Controllers/Managers or by the site.
This new Manufacturing Standard means not only can we can cultivate the best food safety culture amongst our colleagues across all the sites, we can have the greatest confidence in product safety systems, processes and procedures used by the sites. This guarantees that we are producing food that is safe, compliant and of the highest quality in the market, always.