fresh produce. Some, primarily the early
events, were clearly attributable to poor
practices, particularly hygienic, which re-
sulted in stricter and more clearly
worded food safety expectations. Other
produce-linked outbreaks could not be
linked to specific contamination events,
but fresh produce customers and GAP
auditors, needing to “do something” to
reduce food safety risks, embellished
FDA’s guidelines in subtle but impor-
tant ways. Unfortunately, there was no
lenge of finding ways to reduce the audit
burden without sacrificing food safety
assurance.
Audits Benchmarking Matrix
The first challenge was to understand
why some customers would only accept
the audits or certifications of certain organizations and not accept the audit reports or certifications of others. For
most, the decision came down to trust.
Without knowing the audit company, let
“It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the focus on
produce food safety began to shift to
microbiological concerns…”
organization to the changes, and today,
there are dozens of produce food safety
standards and audits widely used in
North America, many with customer-specific additions. This would not necessarily be a problem, but as is also
common for processed food operations,
many customers have become very particular about which standards and audit
companies they are willing to accept.
Consequently, more often than not,
growers are faced with having to endure,
and usually pay for, multiple audits. It is
not unusual for a grower to have almost
as many audits as they have actual and
potential customers.
By 2007, “audit fatigue” had become
almost as big an issue in the fresh pro-
duce industry as food safety. The costs
of these many audits were beginning to
be felt by customers as well as by the
suppliers. However, customers, wanting
to reduce costs by accepting audit re-
ports from other audit organizations,
discovered that they could not readily
compare one audit report to another be-
cause of the different audit standards
and audit processes being used. It was at
this point that the United Fresh Produce
Association Food Safety and Technology
Council—over 90 volunteer technical ex-
perts from United Fresh member organi-
zations, representing the entire fresh
produce supply chain—took on the chal-
alone the auditor, how would a customer
know whether the certification or audit
results were reliable?
Produce GAPs Harmonization
Initiative
Another key realization from the
Global Conference on Produce Food
Safety Standards was that the standards
and checklists used by the different organizations for GAP food safety audits
appeared to be more than 95% the same,
which seemed to promise an opportunity to harmonize the audit expectations. If the food safety standards and
checklists were harmonized across the
different groups, then it should make it
easier for customers to compare audit re-
