Evaluation of food safety management systems in Serbian dairy industry

Abstract

This paper reports incentives, costs, difficulties and benefits of food safety management systems implementation in the Serbian dairy industry. The survey involved 27 food business operators with the national milk and dairy market share of 65 %. Almost two thirds of the assessed dairy producers (70.4 %) claimed that they had a fully operational and certified HACCP system in place, while 29.6 % implemented HACCP, but had no third party certification. ISO 22000 was implemented and certified in 29.6 % of the companies, while only 11.1 % had implemented and certified IFS standard. The most important incentive for implementing food safety management systems for Serbian dairy producers was to increase and improve safety and quality of dairy products. The cost of product investigation/analysis and hiring external consultants were related to the initial set-up of food safety management system with the greatest importance. Serbian dairy industry was not greatly concerned by the financial side of implementing food safety management systems due to the fact that majority of prerequisite programmes were in place and regularly used by almost 100 % of the producers surveyed. The presence of competency gap between the generic knowledge for manufacturing food products and the knowledge necessary to develop and implement food safety management systems was confirmed, despite the fact that 58.8 % of Serbian dairy managers had university level of education. Our study brings about the innovation emphasizing the attitudes and the motivation of the food production staff as the most important barrier for the development and implementation of HACCP. The most important identified benefit was increased safety of dairy products with the mean rank scores of 6.85. The increased customer confidence and working discipline of staff employed in food processing were also found as important benefits of implementing/operating HACCP. The study shows that the level of HACCP implementation was high, either as standalone food safety system or incorporated in the ISO 22000 and its benefits to the dairy industry in Serbia were significant.