Conduct an internal audit of the juice line food safety program

What is going on

The internal audit schedule requires the juice line at Dandenong South to be audited this month against the HACCP plan and its supporting programs. The line pasteurises and cold fills chilled juice, and its critical control points are pasteuriser holding temperature and time and cold chain temperature to dispatch. The audit must sample a month of monitoring records, divert valve tests, cleaning records, calibration certificates and training records, and include interviews with operators and the line leader. Kwame Asante has agreed to an opening meeting on 21 September. Sarah Okonjo wants graded findings that are factual and traceable to evidence, with corrective actions recorded in the register.

Your brief

Plan, conduct and report an internal audit of the juice line food safety program, using a checklist built from the HACCP plan and the procedures, sampling records and interviewing staff, and recording graded findings with corrective actions in the register.

Work through it

You do not need to do it all. Doing a few of these will show you what the work is like. Your ticks and notes stay on this device.

• Read the HACCP Food Safety Plan and the Batch Record Review and Release Procedure and build an audit checklist covering each critical control point and supporting program for the juice line.
• Prepare the audit plan with scope, criteria, sample sizes, the people to interview and the timetable, and send it to Kwame Asante before the opening meeting.
• Sample the pasteuriser records in the Critical Control Point Monitoring Log for the last month and check readings against the critical limit and the verification signatures.
• Check the calibration status of the pasteuriser chart recorder and the cold store probes in the Maintenance and Calibration Requests system and the training records for the operators interviewed.
• Conduct interviews with the line leader and two operators using open questions about what they do when a limit is exceeded, and record their answers.
• Grade each finding as critical, major, minor or observation with the evidence and the requirement it relates to, and agree corrective actions with the auditee.
• Enter each finding in the Non-conformance and CAPA Register with an owner and a due date and write the audit report for Sarah Okonjo.

What someone in this role would produce

• Audit plan and checklist
• Evidence sampling record
• Interview notes
• Audit report with graded findings
• Register entries for corrective actions