Member Resource:

Canadian Craft Brewery Quality Program

This program was developed for Canadian craft breweries of any size and will be provided to all members of the Ontario Craft Brewers Association at no charge as a member benefit.  The program covers the five key areas of an effective quality management system (QMS):

1. Regulatory and Ingredient Context
2. Leadership
3. Resources
4. Operations
5. Quality Management System Performance Evaluation and Continuous Improvement

The program information descriptions covers the following parts:

Part 1 – Introduction section which outlines the entire program with an explanation of the Tier system:  

Tier 1 for those just getting started and covers minimal regulatory requirements, good manufacturing practices, employee and consumer safety

Tier 2 for those with some level of QMS and covers quality control through reactive measures

Tier 3 for those with an advanced QMS and covers quality assurance through proactive measures

Additional resources are provided from; Brewery Associations, Brewing Training and Research Institutions and Regulatory resources.

Part 2 – The Gap Assessment is a self-assessment tool on an excel spreadsheet.  It consists of the five key QMS sections containing requirements for that section in question format.  As the assessment is done a scorecard is populated to determine the gaps. It will then give the status of the brewery and starts to define best practices.

Part 3 – Is a generic flowchart and action planning tool. The flowchart should be customized to fit your brewery (big or small).  The action planning tool helps you capture needed actions to address the gaps. The action plan should be prioritized by each brewery to assign work and manage the results.  

Part 4 – Guidelines, this section defines the requirements for each Tier level of the 5 key sections of:

1. Regulatory and Ingredient Context
2. Leadership
3. Resources
4. Operations
5. Quality Management System Performance Evaluation and Continuous Improvement

Part 5 – This is a library of Generic Forms, Templates and Standard Operating Procedures be customized by each brewery.

Generic forms include; incoming logs to brewsheets, fermenter logs and packaging transfers are available.  Many generic policies and standard procedures are available with some checksheets. 

The benefits this program provides OCB members, are that this is an: easy to customize set of tools to help improve batch to batch quality and consistency, increase brewery efficiencies, reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction and positions your brewery to be in compliance with further regulatory changes. Each brewery can set its own realistic goals and priorities to improve quality and bottom line as they grow.

The full program can be accessed through the link on the OCB member dashboard.