This month, please meet Meenakshi Gaheer! Meenakshi is a long term consultant who has been with FSS for over 11 years. Before Meenakshi started with Food Safety Solutions, she had a varied background as a microbiologist and professor, a food safety specialist in farming and a corporate food safety manager for bakery processing operations. Meenakshi has a strong background in microbiology, validation methods and general sciences, and has a lot of hands-on experience implementing the BRC standard.
When starting to work with a new client, Meenakshi is not afraid to get her hands dirty and jumps right in to understand a new process or commodity. Meenakshi is a talented auditor for several of the GFSI schemes, as well as an approved CanadaGAP Trainer.
Let’s get to know Meenakshi a little better!
What was your first job in the food industry?
I came to Canada in 2000 and completed BSc Hons and Masters in Microbiology. I started working as the HACCP coordinator at a Mushroom Farm in Campbellsville, while completing my thesis for my Masters. Aside from being the HACCP Coordinator, sometimes I had to perform sanitation activities like running the floor-scrubber if it needed to get done!
What is the furthest or oddest places you’ve had to travel for this job?
Being an auditor can take you to some remote locations on the globe. Since becoming a CanadaGAP auditor there are many times I’ve had to drive to remote farm locations in Northern Saskatchewan or Alberta. Some locations are an 800 km round trip for a 4 hour audit. Smoky Lake, AB is probably the farthest North I have been so far. I didn’t always have google maps back when I started auditing, and remote locations can be challenging to find with only paper maps!
I’ve traveled many times to Newfoundland for other audits – not the easiest location to get to from Alberta, even though it’s in your own country. At another time during the global pandemic, I had to stay in a trailer to complete an audit in Mifflintown, PA as there were no hotels open.
What is your favorite prerequisite program?
It’s a tie between Sanitation and Training/Personnel: I love teaching/training, so I enjoy creating these programs to help sites have effective training programs in place. Sanitation is key components for any food safety program, and taking the time to set these programs up correctly from the beginning makes a huge difference. Using basic concepts and tools such as a detailed Master Cleaning Schedule is critical, as is designing a risk based environmental program to verify that your sanitation practices are working.
Please share a top consulting client success story:
I started consulting with a bakery client located BC over 3 years ago and developed their food safety program from scratch in conjunction with their team. They were preparing for their first third-party audit in order to supply their products to a major retail chain. We worked very hard on this and in the end they were able to achieve a 98% score on their first food safety audit! Three years later we have now completed building upon their original programs to successfully pass their first SQF audit with a score above 90%!
Another success story – a BC haskap grower that I worked with to implement the CanadaGAP program achieved a perfect 100% score in their first audit and continued this trend on their next two successive CanadaGAP audits!
What is your food safety superpower?
Can I have two??
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- Helping clients to prepare and succeed in a food safety audit
- Training QA/QC personnel on the standard requirements for the BRCGS Food Standard and conducting rigorous, value added Internal Audits to this same standard.