When a foreign material contamination situation occurs at a meat or poultry processing plant, it is often the result of a piece of equipment malfunctioning.
However, when those incidents occur, it is important to look at what went wrong in the process, rather than to point fingers at who in the plant might be responsible, Matt Henderson, Land O’Frost director of food safety, said while speaking during the session, “The Role of Risk Assessments in Addressing Foreign Material.” The session was held as part of the 2021 International Production & Processing Expo (IPPE) Marketplace.
Henderson said while people are usually involved, when a foreign material contamination situation occurs, including one that is a repeat occurrence, it is best to “implement a root cause solution.”
“We have a tendency to want to have a person to be able to point to, to say, “We counseled this person, we retrained this person. They weren’t doing the right thing. It’s their fault,’” Henderson said. “That's just simply not the way that that we're really able to improve upon processes most of the time. It's the process and not the employees that really lead to these types of ongoing repetitive issues and we have to have a system that will allow us to to eliminate that that human error. Blame doesn't really help anyone correct a situation.”
Henderson said it is important for people who oversee plant operations to ask themselves if they have conducted the right type of training and also if that training was communicated effectively. In some instances, plants have workers who speak different languages, and it is important to make sure those messages were conveyed in a manner where language barriers were not present.
It is also good to make sure that the correct individuals have been assigned certain tasks. If a person is assigned to a certain task within a plant, make sure they have the skills to be successful in their roles, Henderson said.
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