Thanks to everyone who attended last week's workshop. We've had some good ideas to help increase the availability and affordability of verification services.

In the meantime, we will publish guide prices and durations for verification at different types of businesses. We will share this with you for input before we publish it. Please advise any business that cannot find a verifier within this price range to contact MPI. As a temporary measure, we will arrange their verification where necessary. Please help us to reassure businesses that we are all working together to make verification affordable!

We've put a number of short and long term solutions to the Minister, and will let you know as soon as any decisions are made. Ideas include: 

• fast track competency assessment
• recognition without QMS for some types of verification
• verifier training programme
• 'batch' organisation of verification in different locations
• remote verification
• more guidance for national programmes
• digital map of verifiers in different locations

While some solutions may seem simple, no one solution is likely to work for everyone. Whatever solutions we agree must ensure that verifiers have the right knowledge and experience to do their job.

To help us assess solutions, could councils let us know how many national programme businesses they have in their area, and how many of these fall into food service or food retail categories? If you have any other comments, concerns or ideas, please let us know.

Email: FoodAct.verification@mpi.govt.nz

A reminder that MPI is conducting a survey to find out how much it costs businesses to comply with food safety regulation. This survey will help us understand how much businesses spend now, so that we can monitor the effect of the new law. 

If you haven't already, please share the survey with businesses. Find the survey here.

As always, upcoming Food Act Workshops can be found here

Food Act Workshops

The Korean translation of the template food control plan guidance is now available.

Download it here.

We are continuing to develop the online system for reporting verification data. In order to test the reporting functionality, we need some real data to populate the system. Ongoing security issues mean that only MPI can currently access the system, so we need your help to give us data. If you're willing to share them, please send us copies of the verification reports you've given to businesses over the past three months. We'd really appreciate any reports that use the new verification topics.

Please send the reports to: Verification.Monitoring@mpi.govt.nz
Or post them to: Ann Oliver, Ministry for Primary Industries, Pastoral House, 25 The Terrace, Wellington 6140

A reminder that MPI has developed a template for reporting to businesses. Download the template [PDF, 231 KB]

Please note that you are still required to report verification data to MPI using the monthly reporting spreadsheet. 

You can use MAPS reports to extract a list of MPI-registered sites. The report groups the sites by local authority, and gives you visibility of the food businesses in your region that are registered with MPI. You can set up MAPS to automatically email you the report every day/week/month, whatever suits you.

Page 21 of the MAPS User Guide describes how to run these reports.

We want to make sure this newsletter gives you the information you need to do your job. If there's anything specific you'd like to see addressed in this newsletter, please let us know, and we'll try our best to include it! Contact Naomi - naomi.landau@mpi.govt.nz