Do you want to get your dog food, cat food, dog treats, or cat treats sold at Walmart? Like Whole Foods, Walmart has certain expectations in the way of food safety.
Let’s pretend Walmart wants to sell your dog or cat food at their stores. Besides having a good product, what do you need to get your pet food on their shelves?
You need to make sure your pet food is safe for animals to eat of course! Now more than ever consumers and retailers are becoming more cautious about the safety of their pet’s food. Consumers are also demanding less processed ingredients for their animals which can add more layers to your food safety system.
Walmart Requires a GFSI Certification
Walmart requires a Global Food Safety Initiative certification (GFSI certification) to be obtained and maintained properly at all of your production facilities before Walmart will carry your pet food brand. The GFSI is a private organization that benchmarks food safety standards for businesses.
As part of your GFSI certification and GFSI audit, you must also have a HACCP plan in place.
Just like human food, pet food requires food safety for production and record keeping for a successful pet food recall. You might have seen stories in the news about a pet food recall due to unsafe ingredients.
When toxic ingredients are found in pet food it’s important to know if the toxic ingredient is present in any of your products. And Walmart needs to know which batch must be removed during a recall so contaminated food does not go out to their customers. This is why batch management is so important and one of many reasons why Foodready is a great choice for food safety software. Our software does batch management so you can be “recall ready” at any moment. We offer complete food traceability capability.
FoodReady is a food safety software and consulting company. Our software has a HACCP builder, food traceability, you can create your own checklists to manage your HACCP plan or track other items, ingredients, tasks, or events. With our Enterprise program you will have access to food safety quality assurance professionals like our GFSI consultant who can help you with the GFSI audit, SQF audit, GMP, SOP, BRC, CGMP, HACCP, gap analysis, or prepare for audits like the Costco audit, the Whole Foods audit, Publix audit, Kroger audit, Safeway audit, Meier audit, HEB audit and more.
