When you are one of the UK’s leading supermarket chains, with over 800 stores nationwide, food safety and consumer health are the highest priority.
We are engaged as an outsourced quality control service, visiting each supermarket in the chain every six months, completely unannounced to ensure that the supermarket head office is getting a true snapshot of the store’s working practices, rather than them being prepared for an audit.
Two-Fold Audit Process
Firstly, our operative enter as a customers, collecting samples of fresh produce from areas which are considered potential high-risk and therefore hygiene critical, including:
- The Bakery
- Delicatessen
- Hot Food Counter
- Salad Bar
- In-house Café
These products are purchased and taken to our temperature-controlled vehicle for storage, where they are labelled and tagged.
The GSG operative then re-enters the store and identifies themselves to customer services and the store manager. Dressed in appropriate food safety garments and with food hygiene qualification ID, they visit designated areas of the store and, using specialist equipment, they take up to 100 swabs from knives, counters, doors, storage units, nozzles and other areas where a sanitary environment is vital.
When all the samples have been collected, together with the purchased items, they are taken via our own temperature-controlled trunking network to arrive in the laboratory in Newcastle for testing within 24 hours.
Our team visit the entire store network on a rolling basis, and have covered between 10 and 20 sites a week since the project started in July 2018.
