Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) refers to the Practices which manufacturers, processors, and packagers should take as proactive steps to ensure that their products are safe, pure, and effective.
GMP requires a quality approach to manufacturing, enabling companies to minimize or eliminate instances of contamination, mixups, and errors. This in turn, protects the consumer from purchasing unsafe and poor quality products. Failure of firms to comply with GMP can result in very serious consequences including recall, seizure, fines, and imprisonment. It addresses issues including recordkeeping, personnel qualifications, sanitation, cleanliness, equipment verification, process validation, and complaint handling. Most GMP requirements are very general and open-ended, allowing each manufacturer to decide individually how to best implement the necessary controls. This provides much flexibility, but also requires that the manufacturer interpret the requirements in a manner which makes sense for each individual business.
The foundation for Food Safety is infrastructure and hygiene. Quality and food safety improvement and maintenance is a continuous process. It can be achieved if primary production measures, production operations, storage and packaging are monitored properly with care. Food Regulations have substantial influence on the manufacturer.
Adoption of Good Hygienic Practice (GHP), Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), food safety management systems based on HACCP/ISO 22000 and quality management systems based on ISO 9001 help food processing industries to maintain food quality and safety. In India, quality of export consignments is certified by several Government Agencies. The Quality and food safety inspection is carried out by conducting physical, chemical and microbiological examinations and monitoring of levels of various toxic contaminants like aflatoxins, heavy metals and pesticide and drug residues in various foods. Since most of food poisoning cases arise out of microbiological contamination, therefore, stringent measures are taken to control these contaminants during the manufacture of food products.
Governments can consider the contents of this document and decide how best they should encourage the implementation of these general principles to: