Quality Manager must establish a precise plan for the controls and analyses required to ensure food safety. Download our free quality control plan Excel template, designed to simplify the management of testing and guarantee food safety.
1) What is a Quality Control Plan?
2) Why Use Our Quality Control Plan Template?
3) Download our quality control plan template now!
What is a Quality Control Plan?
In the food industry, ensuring food safety and compliance with standards is a top priority. To achieve this, companies rely on structured quality control plans, which include systematic and periodic testing and analyses. However, creating and managing these plans can quickly become complex.
That's why we’ve designed a free Excel quality control plan template, specifically tailored for professionals in the food industry.
A quality control plan encompasses all the analyses and tests required to:
- Release a production batch after verifying its compliance.
- Monitor specific contaminants or other critical parameters over defined periods.
These plans are based on risk assessments, in-depth hazard analyses, and the definition of compliance criteria, whether technical or related to food safety.
Why Use Our Quality Control Plan Template?
Creating and managing a control plan can be tedious. Our Excel template simplifies the process with pre-built features:
- Automation: Save time by automating parts of your analyses.
- Customization: Easily adapt the template to fit your specific needs.
- Accurate Tracking: Define compliance criteria, testing frequencies, and subcontracted laboratories.
- Cost Management: Evaluate the cost of each analysis for better budget control.
📥 Download Our Quality Control Plan Template
How Will This Quality Control Template Help You ?
Our Excel template includes ready-to-use columns to manage your compliance criteria, testing frequencies, analysis costs, and timelines. It also features dynamic links to easily connect analyses to your production batches.
Fully customizable, this template can be tailored to fit your specific needs perfectly.
1. What needs to be controlled: selection of analyses and methods
It is essential to select appropriate analyses based on technical, sanitary, or nutritional criteria. Tests validated according to standards (AOAC, ISO, NF, EN) ensure reliable and reproducible results.
2. Who performs the analyses or controls: connection with laboratories
Internally or through external laboratories. Collaborating with independent laboratories, whether accredited or not, ensures reliable analyses, provided their results are validated through audits or comparative testing.
3. What are the specifications: defining compliance criteria
Control criteria are divided into two categories:
Technical and/or nutritional: These ensure compliance with your specifications (e.g., fat content, density, dry matter, etc.) and must be based on consistent analyses. Some, like water activity (AW), can also provide insights into food safety.
Food Safety : Based on regulations and your risk assessment (e.g., EC regulations 915/2023 and 2073/2005), these criteria often address microbiological, chemical, or physical risks, as well as allergens.
Constant regulatory monitoring is essential to keep these criteria up to date.
4. When to perform the analyses: choosing frequencies
It is crucial to establish control frequencies for analyses based on the risk assessment. These frequencies can be annual, monthly, systematic, or other intervals.
5. Management of timelines and costs
An effective control plan includes:
- Realistic timelines for each analysis, factoring in logistics.
- An evaluation of unit costs for better budget management.
Download our quality control plan template now!
A first step before the full automation of CIKLab.
Although this Excel template is a great starting point, it has some limitations.
If you're looking for a fully automated and secure solution, discover CIKLab, our software dedicated to managing quality control plans in the food industry.
With CIKLab, you benefit from:
- Full automation of controls for each batch.
- Centralized and intuitive management of analyses and laboratories.
- Automatic creation of technical documents, such as certificates of analysis.
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