Just heard a small business in our area, just a woman baking bread at home and selling it to local businesses is having to give up ,the reason? ,She has her own well , not on mains water and the Council said her water has to be tested by them on an ongoing basis at a cost of over €2000 , lets just all give in to multi national, supermarkets!
Why is local government doing their best to stop local businesses.
- Thread starter Shelby219
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Local government are doing what the public are demanding, i.e. that our food is safe for consumption. More than 30% of private wells in Ireland are contaminated with e.coli as a result of slurry, grazing, or poorly managed septic tanks being prevalent.
I had my own well tested recently and I'm now down a hefty sum on testing, sterilisation, and a treatment system.
I had my own well tested recently and I'm now down a hefty sum on testing, sterilisation, and a treatment system.
The polluter here will be one of my neighbours, most likely the farmers who owns the field directly behind me, but difficult to prove.
Most environmental damage and pollution in this country is caused by the Farming industry. They are heavily subsidised not to pollute and yet...
Are you suggesting that food safety standards should not apply to small businesses or that Councils are grossly inefficient and so charge way more than they should for testing?
I'm guessing that that is for a years testing and not a single test which depending on what's been tested for, it shouldn't be more that a couple of hundred euro
As somebody who was a third generation food producer I remember in the middle eighties standing on our production floor with my father, the General and Production manager and myself and all four of us were smoking, it was a purpose built factory with tiled walls and concrete floors and the only temperature control was in the fridges, in winter we had to heat the area and summer we opened roof windows to cool
Our products were delivered to nearly every shop in the greater Leinster area in unrefrigerated vans and we had a sales manager who delt with product complaints from end users and hand on heart I'd say that averaged out about 5 week, more in summertime less in winter
By the mid nineties the factory was unrecognisable as it was upgraded to EU standards and the change in production practices and delivery methods to the end consumer meant we all had to rethink and retrain ourselves in the art of food production
But in my mind the biggest change was to come in the next decade where we not only had we'd changed the way we produced and delivered our products we also had to prove that it was done to the highest standards with the focus been of food safety to the end consumer
Not only did our big customers conduct regular audits to their own standards, the Dept of Agri also had a regular person on site with his own office to make sure we were operating to current EU standard but we also had to do audits on all our suppliers and make sure they were also up to standard
It wasn't good enough to know or say you were doing things correctly you had to prove it, document it and be able to stand over it
Now your probably asking what's this got to do with a water test, well its all part of Food safety, it's making sure that when you the customer go shopping and pick up a food product that it is 100% safe for you and your family to consume and that it's produced to the highest standards and free from any harmful contaminants each and every time no mater who the supplier or producer is or where you buy it
As for me and my family business, yes we moaned and groaned about the ever changing standards, requirements and costs of all this
but at the end of the day the proof was in our product, by the time I left in 2011, customer complaints were around 10 a year,
The majority in summer time and mainly due to something out of my control after the product left our factory
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I work in manufacturing and we've had a similar experience in relation to health and safety within our facility and the quality of our product. We received our ISO 9000 certification (as it was then) in 1990. The current minimum requirement with our largest customer is a 99.98% quality rating, a 99.5% on time delivery rating and a price reduction of a minimum of 2% each year (we have to show how we achieved that through process innovation and the application of technology). We have at least one regulatory audit and at least 6 customer audits each year. Compliance is expensive and onerous but people's lives are at stake. I would be rather annoyed if the same standards were not being applied to our competitors.
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How can any manufacturer achieve year-on-year price reductions of 2% ?
That's 10% over 5 years. What about inflation on raw materials, components and consumables - which must be > 10% per annum these days. And what of wage inflation ?
And why should you have to show how you did this - as the innovation and application of existing technology is a commercially sensitive matter ?
I take it your product is a safety critical one.
But even so, you shouldn't be required to do a technological striptease every year.
JoeRoberts
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Maybe it is the extra holidays they give to certain employees as per another of Purples' posts today...
It's not easy but that's the real world of open international competition. If we were in the protected sectors of the economy we wouldn't have to and we'd be far less efficient and would probably go out of business. This keeps us trim and efficient. It's also quite a high margin business as we compete with American companies and they are very expensive and grossly inefficient. I'm very well paid, as are many of the people on the factory floor. A good few of those guys are on six figure incomes. Don't feel too sorry for us.How can any manufacturer achieve year-on-year price reductions of 2% ?
Raw materials aren't that big a part of our input costs. Labour and capital are the biggies. As long as our productivity increases faster than our wage costs then we are fine. And it does.
We don't go into granular detail. We just have to give headlines about what we've done so that they can't be accused of bullying us and they can pretend it's a partnership.
Yep, it is literally true to say that babies will die if we screw up.
Them's the rules of the game.