PRESENT YOURSELF AND PRESENT YOUR BUSINESS was an IFST Consultancy Group meeting hosted by the IFST Eastern Group at The Bull Hotel in Peterborough on Thursday, 5 October 2017.
The main speaker was Sarah Daniels, from The RedCat Partnership Ltd who presented ‘A foodies guide to social media - 8 key ingredients’. Sarah gave the group some entertaining and pragmatic advice about how to use social media to help achieve business objectives. Being current and consistent were among the points mentioned, but also it is important to enjoy yourself and be human!
After a networking break there were a series of short presentations from consultants and local businesses on topical issues for food businesses:
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CCP or not, John Bassett John Bassett Consulting Ltd.: John took us through a case study of using the Codex risk assessment template to decide if a step in a food production process should be a critical process control point or not.
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Food Authenticity: Testing is not always the answer, John Points explained how, because authenticity analysis reporting is probabalistic, it is important to include it within a formal pre-planned investigation process to ensure pragmatic decision-making is possible.
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From Negative to Positive Turning around a Client site following a failed customer audit to a pass, Louise Roberts of Alimenti Food Sciences Ltd took us through the steps in turning around a client site after a failed audit.
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We’re all stakeholders in food, Paul Fieldhouse Nutritional Information Solutions: Paul introduced the NIS Nutritics software solution for food labelling, which has been developed by a team at the Quadram Institute (formerly IFR) in Norwich.
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A career of two halves: Part 11, Bill Bowman, of RGB Food Management Services, gave us some interesting highlights of his career which has included auditing, consulting and surveying.
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IFST Consultants in Collaboration - How many beans? Rachel Ward & Ruth Dolby, explained how they have developed and delivered (with a team of other consultants) a series of three workshops to equip SME’s and food and drink businesses into translating concepts into tangible products and to scale-up and grow.
The presentations demonstrated the variety and importance of consultancy and training to the UK food and drink industry, and how IFST consultants can work with businesses to deliver safe, authentic, correctly labelled and high-quality product; all within a sustainable business model.
All agreed it was a fun and useful evening – to be repeated soon!