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Product Recall
RQA Group are the leading providers of product recall advice and planning, product recall training and simulations. This is supported by our extensive experience in managing and advising on over 1,500 product recall incidents across many industries, as well as supporting insurers and law firms.
We strongly recommend a Plan, Train and Test approach to product recall preparedness to help you mitigate the potential brand damaging impact a recall can have. A well-handled product incident can help improve your brand image, whereas a poorly handled recall could affect share price and even ultimately result in the closure of a business.
Take our Recall Readiness Assessment below to find out how recall ready you are.
Plan
Whether you need to create a product recall plan from scratch or would like us to review your existing plans, RQA can help.
Product Recall Plan Development
Our consultants will work with you to develop your product recall plan. Depending upon company size and structure, this will usually involve a specialist product recall consultant visiting your office or site to discuss the product recall planning process and then going through key elements of the product recall plan. If time is available, the consultant will start to prepare draft sections of the product recall plan during the day.
The RQA consultant will then compile the information into a draft product recall plan for review and discussion before finalising the plan.
Product Recall Plan Review
RQA can carry out a desk top review of your existing product recall plans and provide a report highlighting recommendations for further development based upon best practice and RQA experience.
If you would like to discuss developing or reviewing a recall plan get in touch on [email protected]
Recalls can be very costly, to find out how much a recall might cost your business click below to use our cost of recall calculator.
Train
Once the product recall plan is prepared your product recall team will need to be trained; to understand what their roles and responsibilities are in a crisis and to familiarise themselves with the plan and how to use it.
Product Recall Training
RQA has unrivalled knowledge and experience of providing support in over 1500 product incidents and this experience is fed back into our product recall training courses and simulations to ensure they are realistic and effective. This experience in product recall allows us to provide a high level of training for your recall team, bringing them up to date with current legislation, recall techniques and the risk assessment process. The courses we offer enable your team to better manage any future recall incidents. Topics covered include recall case studies, legislation, media attention, data, costs, risk assessment, best practice in recall planning and includes a mini-simulation exercise.
Your product recall team will therefore be best prepared if such an incident arises. For those in the food and drink industry, our courses also help to ensure your compliance with specific clauses of the BRC Global Standard for Food Safety.
Test
The next step is to put your plans and team to the test with a challenging, realistic scenario.
Product Recall Simulation
The best way to challenge your recall team and establish how useful and robust your recall plans are is to put them to a test with a product recall simulation exercise. This is not a simple traceability exercise, or mock recall, it is a realistic and challenging, scenario-based exercise to test plans, procedures and your recall team. RQA develop bespoke scenarios based on our experience in real incidents to fully challenge your team and your recall plans to ensure you get maximum benefit from the exercise. It is also a requirement of BRC and other retailer standards that you undergo a product recall simulation each year, so why not drop us an email now to discuss your next exercise and find out more.
Traceability Exercise
We can also carry out a more frequent but less involving mock recall or traceability exercise to simply test a company’s traceability capability and provide reassurance that the systems are effective and fit for purpose. This will identify gaps and providing compliance with audit requirements.
All data and information will be collated into a final report which can provide individual factory overviews as well as summary tables covering multiple factories in a group. The mock traceability exercise and report will help to demonstrate compliance with traceability requirements in audits.
If you are looking for assistance with a live recall, click here to find out how we can help
Other relevant services
RQA Group specialise in crisis management and offer a comprehensive and customised service throughout the whole process.
RQA Group can assist you with all aspects of business continuity, from creating a new Business Continuity Plan, assisting in understanding your risk profile and more.
The best way to reduce your product recall risk if you are a food manufacturer is to have a comprehensive food safety and quality programme.
“We have worked with the RQA Group for the past year now and throughout this time, have been able to deliver a complete overhaul to the structure of our Business Continuity Management documentation for our Global portfolio. With Business Impact Analysis, Crisis and Recovery Plans now complete, we have begun working on Simulation exercises to put our plans to the test. The exercises that we have completed to date are professionally run to a high standard and provide great value to our staff and organisation.”
Sarah Jeffrey,
Group Health, Safety and Property Compliance Manager
Charles Taylor Plc
“Service to our insureds has improved considerably since we have partnered with RQA as our product recall crisis consultant. Immediate and efficient responses are a great comfort to companies in crisis and our partners at RQA provide our insureds exactly that!”
Louis Lubrano,
President,
Berkley Global Product Recall
How can we help?
We have specialist skills in a variety of sector and industries, contact us to see how we can help you.
