Serbian meat industry: A survey on food safety management systems implementation

This paper reports incentives, costs, difficulties and benefits of food safety management systems implementation in the Serbian meat industry. The survey involved 77 producers out of which 93.5% claimed that they had a fully operational and certified HACCP system in place, while 6.5% implemented HACCP, but they had no third party certification. ISO 22000 was implemented and certified in 9.1% of the companies, while only 1.3% had implemented and certified IFS standard. The most important incentive for implementing food safety management systems for Serbian meat producers was to increase and improve safety and quality of meat products. Investment in the new equipment, civil work in the plant including redesign of production facilitates were the costs related to the initial set-up with the greatest importance. The results indicated that the major difficulty encountered during HACCP implementation and operation was associated with the finance, namely the fact that companies were not able to recoup costs related to the implementation/operation of HACCP system. The most important identified benefit was increased safety of food products with mean rank scores 6.45. The increased quality of food products and working discipline of staff employed in food processing were also found as important benefits of implementing/operating HACCP in Serbian meat industry. The study shows that the level of HACCP, as standalone food safety system or incorporated in part to ISO 22000, implementation is high and its benefits to the meat industry in Serbia are widespread and significant. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.