Non-conformance, Food Safety Glossary

A failure to meet a food safety requirement, standard or procedure that a business is expected to follow. A non-conformance is any instance where a requirement is not met. In food safety, that requirement might be a critical limit, a procedure, a legal obligation under the Food Standards Code, or a condition set by an auditor or the business's own food safety program. A fridge running above 5 degrees Celsius, a missed cleaning task or an out of date record are all examples of non-conformances. Non-conformances are identified through monitoring, verification, internal audits and external inspections or audits. They are not the same as a corrective action; the non-conformance is the problem, and the corrective action is the response. Recording non-conformances is important, because patterns in them point to underlying weaknesses that need a more permanent fix. During an Australian council environmental health inspection or a food safety audit, findings are often written up as non-conformances, sometimes graded by seriousness. A critical non-conformance, such as inadequate temperature control, usually requires immediate action, while a minor one might be a paperwork gap that must still be addressed within a set time. Handling a non-conformance well means dealing with the immediate issue, recording it, and then looking at why it happened. Repeated non-conformances of the same type are a signal to carry out root cause analysis and change a procedure, retrain staff or repair equipment, rather than just fixing the same symptom again and again. At a Gold Coast restaurant, an internal audit records a non-conformance because the cool room log shows several readings above 5 degrees Celsius with no corrective action noted. The finding prompts the manager to repair the seal, retrain staff on logging and follow up to confirm the problem does not recur.