When I was younger, I watched a movie called Deliver Us From Eva, where the lead actress played a food safety inspector. She went into restaurants and checked on proper food storage, cleanliness and that sort of thing. After watching it, I was convinced that I would be great at that job!
Fast forward to my Master’s program when I got to see a USDA inspector in action! They showed up to a kiwifruit facility to check for quality and to make sure they were meeting the grading criteria set forth. I had previously told my Major Professor that I wanted to be an auditor, and he tried to talk me out of it and told me I was confused! Well, on this day, he pointed out all of the reasons why I wouldn’t like the job. I didn’t end up listening to him and a few years later after transitioning into food safety, I became a food safety auditor. It wasn’t quite like what I envisioned based on what I saw in the movies, but it was definitely a worthwhile, eye-opening experience. Am I still an auditor? No. But, am I glad I was one? Yes.
Table of Contents
What is a Food Safety Auditor?
What It’s Really Like to be a Food Safety Auditor
The funny thing about the picture above is that this is what people expect a food safety auditor to do! However, to give you a more realistic view, this is what goes into performing an audit.
Preparing for an Audit
- Scheduling – You have to go through the entire process of being selected for and scheduled for the audit. You are either specifically chosen, or you have to put a quote together with your travel costs and the coordinators will select the auditor who can meet the desired dates of the auditee (the person/company who will be audited) at the lowest price.
- Preparation – Contact the auditee and set up the meeting time (this is supposed to be ~ a week in advance of the audit), print out necessary materials (e.g., checklists to write notes on), and do any crop specific related research (e.g., if you are doing a leafy green audit in California, you need to be sharp on the LGMA guidelines).
- Travel – Unless you live in a large agricultural region, you are most likely going to have to do some traveling to get to the audit. Depending on the distance, you will often have to travel a day early and stay in a hotel the night before the audit starts. You also need to factor in any time needed to get a rental car or travel to the airport, depending on how you are traveling.
Performing an Audit
- Opening Meeting
- Visual Inspection
- Documentation Review
- Closing Meeting
Opening Meeting
When the auditor arrives, an opening meeting takes place to confirm the crops being audited, the types of audit(s) that will be performed, the schedule to follow for the day (even down to the details of what you will do for the lunch break), and any other relevant information.
Visual Inspection
Whether it is a field or facility, there is a visual inspection portion of the audit. Depending on the auditor, they can perform either the visual inspection first or the documentation review first. I always performed the visual inspection first so that I could look at the documentation second to verify that what they had written in the documentation matched what I saw during the visual observation.
To give you a more specific idea of what this consists of, a visual inspection of a growing area consists of: touring the perimeter of the field (usually in the auditee’s vehicle) to observe any potential risks from the adjacent land or any issues within the growing area, observing the water source(s) and any storage areas or containers. It is also best practice to get out of the vehicle and walk through a portion of the field to see if there are any potential risks to the crop, such as animal tracks, foreign materials, fecal matter, etc. If you are auditing a harvesting crew or there are any workers present during a field audit, additional observation needs to take place. Specifically with a harvest crew, there are a lot of factors to observe, including worker hygiene (e.g., are they washing their hands after using the bathroom), if they are handling the crop properly, whether they understand the rules, etc.
A visual inspection of a facility consists of: walking through the operation to ensure that the flow meets the flow chart, observing the sanitation of the operation (including any storage areas), worker hygiene, to see if any risks are presented to the product throughout the process, etc. (You can learn more about what is included in the food safety auditing process HERE.) This step could take anywhere from a half hour to more than two hours, depending on the size of the operation and the processes being performed.
Documentation Review
This step takes forever! You have to keep in mind that this is just one day of reviewing the operation, so you cannot go through every single record. However, it is the auditor’s responsibility to review a sampling of the food safety records and to review every procedure that is required by the audit scheme. This is a very timely process because it’s not just reviewing to see if they have the procedures, but that the procedures meet the audit requirements and are actually being practiced accordingly in the operation (e.g., does what is written match what they are actually doing).
The record review process is a very important part of the audit because that is where a lot of issues can be uncovered, such as if a non-conformance occurred and was recorded and no corrective actions were taken, if the pre-harvest intervals (the time between when pesticides are applied and when the crop is harvested) weren’t followed, if workers were missing food hygiene training, etc.
This portion takes a lot of time. I personally have never been able to do this portion in less than 5 hours (except for one specific harvest crew that was very prepared and had all of their documentation extremely organized). There are special cases, for example, when doing multiple audits for the same organization (e.g., 20 ranches for company XYZ). In this case, all 20 ranches would have the same procedures to follow, so you would only need to review the procedures once and then review the records for each ranch (and visually observe each ranch). So if you were to breakdown the total documentation review time by 20 ranches, it would not equal 5 hours per ranch because each ranch does not have unique procedures that need to be reviewed individually.
Closing Meeting
At the end of the audit, the auditor takes time to compile all of the non-conformances that were identified during the audit (they are also supposed to be called out directly during the audit when detected). During the closing meeting, these non-conformances are reviewed, along with the timeframes for submitting the audit report, for the auditee to submit corrective actions, and for the auditor to review those.
After leaving the audit, the auditor either travels home (depending on how far away they are), travels to a different area for their audit the next day, or returns to their hotel to prepare to travel the next day.
Writing the Audit Report
After the audit, the auditor has homework to perform in the form of an audit report. Just as with the actual audit, it takes a lot of time to write out a quality audit report, with detailed comments for each question. It has taken me up to 6 hours to write one. So, you either work on this the night of the audit, if you are staying in a hotel, or have to plan time to write reports at another point throughout the week or weekend (depending on how booked you are with other audits or other work).
Realities of Being a Food Safety Auditor
- Interacting with the Auditee – Essentially, you are spending a day with a stranger. And to put it honestly, they do not want you there. They just want to get the audit over with! You are critiquing their program that they work hard to comply with each and every day and the last thing anyone wants is to have someone come in and point out all of the things they are doing wrong, without being able to help them. So, I always say that as an auditor, more than anything, you are working to mediate tension and handle different behaviors each day with the different auditees that you interact with because some people are great and very respectful of the process, but there are others who do not agree with anything you say (especially if they had a lax auditor the previous cycle) and you have to make it through the day with them as peacefully as possible.
- Type of Auditor – There are two types of food safety auditors: employed auditors and sub-contracted auditors. Though, let it be clear, all food safety auditors have the same responsibilities when they show up to perform an audit. Employed auditors work full-time for the food safety auditing companies and have their schedules set for them. Sub-contracted auditors have to bid for audits, consistent work is not guaranteed, and they have to pay for their own liability insurance. (Sub-contracted auditors also normally provide consultation services to produce companies that they do not audit.) They do, however, make significantly more money per audit than the employed auditors and get to turn down work when they want to.
- Seasonality – No matter where you are located, it is not common that there will be produce operations in season and ready to be audited year-round. I say this with the exception of the Salinas Valley in California, but even there, a lot of companies move their workers to the Yuma, Arizona / Baja, California region for half of the year. This same concept applies for auditors. A lot of the California-based auditors go to the desert during the wintertime for an extended period of time to work. They have to go where the work is. So there might be work near where you live for part of the year, but you will also be expected to do extensive traveling. The great part about being a sub-contracted auditor is that you can determine the amount that you want to work, which coincides with the amount of time you are traveling.
- The Importance of Time – Besides the actual amount of time it took to perform an audit and fill out the audit report (all of which did take a lot of time), I always felt like I was traveling too much. On average, I would drive about three hours each day to get to and from an audit. Although I would try to listen to podcasts or call family to help pass the time, I always felt like that was wasted time. During that time, I always thought about what I could be doing instead, such as spending more time with my husband, going outside or even writing my audit reports!
Positives of Being a Food Safety Auditor
- Expedited Learning – Getting to go to a different operation each day and learn about how different crops are grown was really a blessing. Although you are there to perform food safety audits, there is also a little wiggle room to ask questions about how the growing, harvesting, cooling, storing, packing, processing, etc. operations work. Unless you work for a huge produce company, you do not get exposure to multiple crops like this. Without this experience, I would have never started this blog or even had the idea to share this with others.
- Great People – Although I mentioned above that auditing can be difficult dealing with certain behaviors sometimes, there are also a lot of really great people that you get to meet. Not only that, but they are incredibly passionate about what they do and love to share it with others. (The same sort of thing applies for the operations I visit to share on the blog.)
- Career Advancement – This was the main reason why I agreed to become an auditor. It was never an end goal, but more of something I understood as an expedited learning process that could help take me to the next step in my career. I, of course, changed paths a few times after that and now use that education to provide food safety consulting services, so that I can help companies learn how to comply with their audits (without just pointing out the issues while not being able to help correct them).
If you are interested in learning more about food safety, these posts might be of interest: