Huge success and rapid growth is what every small business owner dreams of when they open their doors, but when it happens, these companies can find themselves suddenly faced with an overwhelming docket of food safety and quality control challenges that they may not be ready to tackle.
In 1994, New French Bakery started out as a small bakery attached to a café in the trendy warehouse district of Minneapolis, MN. Peter Kelsey, owner and head baker, attended the Cordon Bleu Cooking School in Paris, leaving later to study as an apprentice with a Parisian baker who taught him the importance of using real ingredients and a skilled craftsman’s approach to production baking.
When he opened his shop in Minneapolis, it quickly gained a reputation for offering delectable baked breads and sweets, with hip staff and a cool atmosphere. Kelsey expanded with a delivery service a few years later that brought fresh baked goods to local markets and restaurants, but, it wasn’t until he added a frozen foods division that business skyrocketed. Today, New French Bakery is an $11 million wholesale enterprise, producing fresh, frozen and par-baked artisan breads and sweets on a mass scale. The product line includes more than 700 different varieties, roughly 80 percent of which are their signature artisan baguettes, rolls, boules and loaves sold direct to consumers, in grocery stores and in restaurants around the country.
With an 18% increase in sales in 2004 alone, the company is continually facing the challenge of investing for growth as it runs at top speed to keep up with current demand. In 2003, the New French Bakery production facility was in the midst of serious growing pains. Housed in a converted nightclub near downtown, the staff was expanding to accommodate increasing nationwide sales, but there were few controls in place to manage how products were being made. It had graduated to a large-scale production facility but was still operating under low-volume production techniques.
There was no quality control staff, and Kelsey, who is committed to quality and taste above all else and had been planning for a quality assurance (QA) program for some time, knew that he needed a food safety expert on staff to streamline the production processes.
Kelsey hired Imme Fernandez as the quality assurance director with the directive to create complete food safety and quality control programs and ensure that as New French Bakery grew, it would continue to produce the highest quality products that its customers had come to expect. Fernandez also needed to get the facility ready for an official American Institute of Baking (AIB) food safety audit, which was requested by a large customer. The company had conducted mock audits in the past but had gone through the process with a third-party auditor.
A Clean Slate
When Fernandez arrived, there was not a single formal written process control or standard operating procedure; there was no allergen control program, no written specs for products, and no tracking systems. “In a way it was nice. There was nothing there and no one else on the QA team, so I could do it any way I wanted,” she says of her early days at New French Bakery. “I started at ground zero, using AIB guidelines as my template.”
Fernandez, who was certified in Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) by Silliker, Inc. for a previous job, began with the basics. No one at the plant had received training in Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) protocols, the minimum requirements for quality, safety and purity set forth by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for manufacturers of food and pharmaceutical products. “Many of them didn’t even know what GMPs were,” she says. So she found some GMP training videos, created a PowerPoint presentation and trained all 150 employees herself. ”It was an important first step,” she says. “I wanted everyone to understand that things were changing, that there would be new rules and processes. The training helped them get used to the idea.”
The GMP training was reasonably well-received, and has become standard for any new employee and New French Bakery before they are allowed near the manufacturing floor.
Once the training was completed, Fernandez began work on defining formal sanitation and Material Systems Data Sheets (MSDS) programs. She assessed every sanitation process step and found the manuals for each piece of equipment to learn how and how frequently it needed to be cleaned and sanitized. “Fortunately, we are a dry plant, so our biggest cleaning tool is a vacuum,” she says. But there were some chemicals being used in spray bottles on key pieces of equipment. She identified which chemicals were being used, collected all the MSDS documents from the vendors and highlighted important facts relating to handling and mixing. She also installed a chemical premeasuring system, which dispenses the chemicals, premixed into labeled bottles, in an effort to eliminate the mess and guesswork associated with manual mixing. “It works like a soda machine,” she says. “It’s a no-brainer to use and it provides much more control.”
Then she wrote the Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures (SSOPs) for each step and trained the sanitation staff on how to do it. Of course, it did take the cleaning team some time to adjust to Fernandez’s new procedures and equipment, especially since few of them had ever had formal training on how to properly handle and use chemicals. But the training and constant, gentle reminders have helped to slowly change the attitude of the whole staff toward a more controlled approach to doing things.