WEGMANS IN TOTAL-STORE HACCP COMMITMENT

NANCY GRIFFIN

ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Walk into any one of the 56 Wegmans Food Markets stores and you'll likely see the employees sporting buttons that read, "Ask me about HACCP."

Ask them about HACCP and you'll undoubtedly get a well-informed answer.

"It's a total-store commitment now," said Carl Salamone, director of seafood for the family-and-employee-owned chain based here. Starting with seafood in 1995, Wegmans has incorporated the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point food-safety system into every department of each store and warehouse.

The continuous monitoring system was mandated by the federal government last year for seafood processors, and the beef and poultry industries are not far behind.

HACCP was not ordered for retailers, but through the Model Food Code, many HACCP guidelines are sneaking in the back doors of all food purveyors. Wegmans decided to usher HACCP in the front door, before any mandate. It's among the first chains to cover its warehouses with an HACCP plan.

"[Owner] Danny Wegman said we wouldn't use HACCP as a competitive tool, we'd just do it for our customers," said Salamone. "We do it because it's the right thing to do."

HACCP not only protects the integrity of Wegmans' perishable products -- thereby increasing consumer confidence -- but empowers employees and gives department managers a common language to use with suppliers, said Wegmans managers.

"We have vendors call us now and say, 'We can't send all the product you ordered, because we can't get enough that meets your specifications.' We'd rather have it that way than the old way -- trying to make do with what we got," said Salamone.

Salamone has been with Wegmans for 32 years. He started out as a part-time worker, cleaning meat departments, worked his way up to meat-department manager, and in 1974 launched Wegmans' separate seafood departments. In 1976, he set up a distribution center for fresh seafood, became seafood director in 1977 and was HACCP-certified by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1995.

"We have upgraded the quality of our incoming product, so that suppliers now know Wegmans accepts only top quality," said Salamone. "Our buyers are buying agents for the consumer, not selling agents for suppliers."

Along with Salamone, Carl Dove was HACCP-certified by the Department of Commerce in 1995. The former seafood manager and trainer is now Wegmans' HACCP trainer. From the seafood departments, the pair extended HACCP to assistant store managers, then moved it into deli, produce, meat and prepared foods.

"We now have more than 700 employees HACCP-certified" out of 29,000 Wegmans employees, said Dove. "We have in-house trainers authorized to give the exam," including part-time associates.

"We began working on our plan in 1995. I used to wonder how I could go home at night and be sure the store would be in the same condition when I came back in the morning. The HACCP plan ensures that," said Dove, adding that representatives from accounting, warehousing, refrigeration, consumer affairs and merchandising are members of the HACCP team.

"Our seafood-quality issues are now objective," said Dove. "We reject product if the temperature is wrong, even if we're offering it on sale and the sale is advertised. We tell our customer the fish came in at the wrong temperature.

"We tell our customers everything we're doing," he said.

That's why employees wear the buttons. They're eager to tell customers about HACCP because each employee bears responsibility for some part of the overall plan and takes pride in making HACCP work, said Dove and Salamone.

At the launch of the program, Wegmans prepared a video on seafood HACCP, called "From the Boat to You."

The video played in seafood departments throughout the chain. All fish was inspected at receiving by Department of Commerce inspectors and stores advertised the inspection program.

Wegmans' branded products, including shrimp, wear a HACCP logo.

"We went to Thailand to set up our own shrimp program," said Salamone. "We send the product and the label to the USDC and they go over it with a fine-tooth comb."

Wegmans' HACCP blueprints in different departments are constantly evolving. For example, seafood personnel take surface temperatures of fish in the seafood case twice a day now, but such measurements were not in the original seafood plan.

Once each quarter, the weekly departmental meetings are devoted to HACCP. Ads are updated quarterly as well. Stores sport HACCP signs and posters. The HACCP logo runs in the ads and on all store-product labels.

Speaking at the International Boston Seafood Show in mid-March, Salamone and Dove shared a panel on retail HACCP with Steven Lange, HACCP coordinator with Harry's Farmers Markets in Atlanta; Mike Bavota, director of seafood sales for Florida Food Marketing; and Karla Ruzicka, chief of the National Training Branch for the USDC's Inspection division.

Harry's supermarket group had the first retail HACCP plan in the country, in 1992. Lange told participants that being first offered many challenges.

"We had no one else in retail to turn to and say, 'Hey, we're stuck. What did you do?' But even with the challenges, once you do it, you'll wonder how you got along without it," Lange said.

"HACCP is the best way to have food safety. Customers notice and it's a good way to build trust."

Challenges included breaking the literacy barrier among employees who spoke a total of 21 languages, and translating HACCP theory into "retail reality," said Lange.

Bavota is a former USDC HACCP trainer and 26-year veteran of the supermarket business whose cookbook, The Seafood Lover's Bible, was recently published by Clear Light Publishers of Santa Fe, N.M.

He reminded participants that HACCP is a food-safety tool only: "Quality is up to the individual business."