Food Safety Focus | Root Cause Analysis

Hello All!

Food Safety Focus

Hello All! 

I hope this message finds all of you and your families safe and well.

This week I want to talk to you about something very simple yet also very profound when it comes to food safety: finding out why something happened.  Sounds simple enough, right?  This is commonly called “Root Cause Analysis” and refers to the process of finding out the true source of any event that happens.  All too often, we treat symptoms of a problem without understanding and treating the true reason at its source.

One tool for finding root causes and all contributing factors is called the fishbone diagram or the Ishikawa diagram, named after Kaoru Ishikawa, a Japanese engineering professor at the University of Tokyo who invented the diagram as a tool to show the potential causes of any effect.  To start the diagram, you simply place the problem or event you want to investigate at the head of the fishbone (usually to the right).  Then add in some major categories to form the ribs of the fishbone diagram, as possible sources for the event that happened, like People, Processes, etc.  Finally, you brainstorm for ideas and list them within each major category, like Training, SOP not updated, etc.  This can help you find out what may be causing something to happen that you didn’t look at before.

It is very important to understand all the causes that are affecting food safety around us in the warehouse.  Whatever method we use to get there, we need to get to the bottom line of the root cause of everything that affects food safety.

Thank you for all that each of you do every Day to ensure safe food for our families!

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Author: Trish Metts