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Leading in Mystery Guest Services

Consultancy
Foodcare

Food defence through the eyes of a mystery guest

Validate the effectiveness of your food defence system with a mystery guest. This service helps you ensure that the measures in place effectively keep unauthorised individuals out and that your team understands how to respond in unexpected situations. The strength of your food safety culture plays a crucial role in maintaining a secure environment.

A mystery guest assessment offers valuable insight by testing the system in practice. It highlights gaps, confirms what's working, and provides clear direction for further improvement.

What are the benefits of a mystery guest?

  • Test the effectiveness of your food defence plan by putting it into practice

  • Raise awareness and teach staff to be alert

  • Expose weaknesses and gain a fresh perspective on the environment

  • Strengthen food safety through structural improvements

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Food defence

Food safety is receiving increasing attention, making it essential for food businesses to strengthen their defences against potential threats. Standards such as BRCGS Food, IFS Food and FSSC 22000 require companies to establish an effective food defence plan. One innovative way to assess the strength of these measures is by deploying a mystery guest.

The role of a mystery guest

A mystery guest is a trained professional who poses as a customer, supplier, or temporary employee to identify vulnerabilities in your organisation’s Food Defence plan. This includes assessing visitor management, access controls to sensitive areas, and procedures around production and storage zones. Discreet and realistic in their approach, the mystery guest simulates everyday scenarios, for example, attempting to access a production hall to observe whether staff respond appropriately to suspicious behaviour. These assessments are always carried out with your prior approval. Afterwards, the mystery guest delivers a detailed report with findings and recommendations, enabling you to take targeted action to further strengthen security.

Advantages of a Mystery Guest

A visit from a Mystery Guest offers various advantages:

  • Reality check: A Food Defense plan on paper is valuable, but the real test is in practice. The Mystery Guest investigates whether the procedure is truly effective.

  • Increased awareness: Staff are more alert because they realize that security can be actively tested.

  • Objective evaluation: A Mystery Guest looks at the situation with a fresh pair of eyes and exposes blind spots in the daily work routine.

A unique opportunity

By deploying a mystery guest, we offer companies a unique opportunity to strengthen their security against deliberate threats. By identifying weaknesses and evaluating measures, this method contributes to a safer food chain and increases organisations' resilience against attacks.

Improve your food defence plan

After the mystery guest's visit, we record the findings and discuss the results. If you follow this advice, it will lead to a stronger food defence plan. We also offer support in implementing improvements. You can repeat the mystery guest visit annually to assess the progress and effectiveness of the plan. The findings also provide valuable input for a training course on food defence. This can be combined with the mystery guest visit to increase both awareness and skills.

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Sustainability advice and guidance

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Guiding certification

You want to be able to prove that you deliver quality. A certificate, quality mark or a combination of these is a great way to achieve this. We help you choose the certification that suits your company. Then we guide the implementation, certification and enforcement. Does your company meet the specific requirements of a standard that you want to adhere to? Then your quality system can usually be certified or recognised by a certifying institution. During an audit, an assessment is made to see whether your company complies with the standard requirements not only in theory but also in practice. Normec Foodcare is here for you to prepare and guide this certification process.
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Setting up a quality system

Do you want to guarantee quality within your company in the food sector? There are many different food safety systems and quality management systems. There are suitable systems for virtually every industry and company. We can help you choose the right quality system and help you to set up a quality system. This is very useful, because every industry has different food safety risks.
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Leading companies in this service

Normec QA

Antwerpen Belgium

Consultancy
Foodcare
Normec QA supports companies in implementing and managing quality management systems within the food industry. We offer advice and tools that help customers integrate quality standards into their daily operations. As a result, they consistently deliver safe and high-quality products.
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Do you want to create a safe and healthy working and living environment?

We test, inspect and certify, enabling organisations to innovate safely, quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.
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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

A mystery guest is a trained professional who poses as a visitor, supplier, or temporary worker to assess the effectiveness of your food defence system. This approach uncovers vulnerabilities and helps improve your organisation’s food security strategy.

Mystery guest visits identify weak points, increase staff awareness, and provide an objective view of your access controls and procedures. It’s a practical tool to validate your food defence plan.