| “Food Safety in the Pacific”. David Haberfield has a lifetime experience in the Food Industry. On graduation in 1983 joined the family dairy company group in various rolls in production, to production manager, NATA signatory etc., transitioning to Marketing Director before the company was sold in 1996. After Parmalat acquired Paul’s, David project managed major reviews and upgrades of a number of large manufacturing plants for Parmalat and others, setting up his own consulting company in 2002. |
He is heavily involved in development and delivery of HACCP systems for the food industry and associated management of food companies.He does Internal and Business Focused Auditing, AQIS – Food safety and has been a RABQSA Principal Food Safety Auditor since 2005.He is also a director of HACCP Fiji, and National Food Institute.David will talk about his roll in developing Food safety systems in the Pacific region.
He spoke about food safety in the Pacific and his work to help make sure that we all stay safe and well. David works for HACCP Australia. HACCP stands for Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point. HACCP is a risk management methodology used by the food and related industries for the control of food safety hazards to acceptable risk levels. This standard was established in 1989 and in the South Pacific since 2004. More specifically, David has worked in Fiji since 2010 and Tonga/Papua New Guinea since 2014. One of his primary tasks is to deliver training around food safety in the region. He has discovered over the years that because of varying standards of living, it can be difficult to identify hazards in various countries. For example, some people are so used to never wearing shoes that their feet become incredibly tough. An outcome of this can be that when they walk across broken glass (for example) it doesn’t hurt them at all. And of course for us, this would be catastrophic! Things that HACCP look at are worker safety, food safety, quality assurance, environment and productivity. A major consideration for HACCP is cross contamination, which can lead to all sorts of problems including food poisoning. Did you know that there are over 5 million cases of food poisoning every year in Australia? 81% of these cases are blamed on retail food purchases. David told us that whilst at university, he did a research project into how many layers of toilet paper are necessary to ensure that there is no cross contamination after going the toilet – the answer was at least 27! HACCP standards also apply to storage and packaging. David spoke of an incident in a restaurant where drano was stored amongst condiments and a new employee was asked to fill salt containers with no supervision. She thought that the drano looked like salt and so filled the containers with it. Many patrons fell ill with severely burnt throats and other ailments. We can never be too careful.