J. J. Keller increases its compliance offering for food safety, HR

Heather Graves

Staff

August 26, 2024

NEENAH – Businesses today are subject to ever-changing rules and regulations from an alphabet soup of agencies – OSHA, USDA, DOT, EPA, DOL and the list goes on.

These compliance requirements impact businesses across industries from manufacturing and transportation to food safety and human resources.

For decades, Dustin Kufahl, vice president of consulting and training services with J. J. Keller® & Associates, Inc., said the company has provided the expert compliance knowledge that companies need when they need it.

“At the end of the day, it’s about us wanting to help companies not only be in compliance but also be safe,” he said. “Rules and regulations, they’re complicated, and for many of our customers, that isn’t their full-time gig. They have other hats that they’re wearing all the time, so they need us to help them navigate through these waters.”

Recently, the Neenah-based company launched additional supports in the food safety and HR sectors, which Kufahl said join an already comprehensive suite of consulting services.

Though best known in the transportation space, Kufahl said J. J. Keller has consistently grown its presence in the EHS (environmental, health and safety) and HR realms.

“We thought it made the most sense to go more from a consulting standpoint in those areas because that’s where we have the most flexibility – use our expertise and subject matter experts to help customers in that space without having to do large builds on a technology side,” he said.

Food service compliance services

Kufahl said three new services have been added to J. J. Keller’s food safety compliance offerings – all of which aim to ensure compliance with the industry’s complex regulations and standards.

The services, he said, are designed to support food manufacturing facilities and food importers to meet requirements set by organizations, such as the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) and even state and local agencies.

“Food safety is not brand new to us as an organization,” he said.

In the past, Kufahl said J. J. Keller would be approached by companies – especially larger ones – in the food industry with an RFP (request for proposal) for a variety of different compliance needs.

“Whether it be audits or policy development or trainings or things like that – we’ve just never been able to fulfill RFPs in that food safety space,” he said. “That’s what drove us to say, ‘okay, let’s get some consulting expertise in some of these areas that we’ve had to, in the past, bow out on.’”

Angela Jersild, director of services marketing at J. J. Keller, said the company has been working with food manufacturing companies in different facets for years – whether that is qualifying their drivers, organizing drug and alcohol tests or legalizing their vehicles.

“We have a lot of trust and recognition with food manufacturers,” she said. “There is a high degree of confidence there, so when we tell them we are expanding, and we now have experts in these new areas to help them, there is already that established trust.”

J. J. Keller’s three new on-site food safety consulting services include:

• Third-Party Food Safety Audit Gap Assessment – prepares a facility for a successful GFSI, GDP (good distribution practice) or HACCP/GMP (good manufacturing practices) audit. Kufahl said it focuses on the same standards used during an actual audit and provides a report of recommendations for improvements.
• Food Safety Plan Development or Review – ensures a company’s plan would pass a regulatory inspection or safety audit. If no plan exists, Kufahl said J. J. Keller will develop a facility-specific plan on the company’s behalf. 
• FSVP Plan Development or Review – helps companies that import FDA-regulated products into the U.S. comply with the Foreign Supplier Verification Program (FSVP) plan requirements. Kufahl said this includes either reviewing an existing plan for compliance or creating a custom plan.

The additional offerings, Kufahl said, also provide companies with consistency and ease.

“A lot of companies like to use one vendor for all these things, if possible,” he said. “It makes it easier from a billing standpoint and (from a confidence standpoint) – knowing they will get a level of consistency regardless of what area they may need to help in.”

Since food safety support has been something customers have “been poking at for quite some time,” Kufahl said the response J. J. Keller has received since officially rolling out the new services has been positive.

“We had some larger customers right away come to us, asking us to bid on a couple of RFPs that weren’t able to in the past, so I definitely think there’s some initial excitement,” he said. “I also think there is that curiosity, too, of what we are actually going to do in that space, and how it’s going to look and feel.”

With the launch of additional services, Kufahl said, came the hiring of an additional food safety consultant.

“We have done food safety in the past, so it’s not 100% foreign to us, and we do have food safety subject matter experts in our editorial team,” he said. “But I personally added a new consultant in the food safety space so we truly have that expertise in-house now.”

Human Resources EDGE

J. J. Keller also introduced a new HR-focused option – Human Resources EDGE (HR EDGE) – which responds to employers’ growing need for more easily accessible HR expertise.

Ann Potratz, J. J. Keller’s editorial content manager, said it is an expansion of the company’s Compliance Network service.

“The compliance network itself offers people with HR responsibilities – which we find is not all the time people who have HR degrees or a ton of background in HR – with support resources,” she said. “HR EDGE, then, is an upgrade to that – offering a lot more hands-on resources.”

The HR EDGE upgrade, Potratz said, provides a variety of content to help professionals navigate the intricacies of HR and employment law compliance.

“It’s really designed for people who need more support than they get in their organization, or that their organization can afford to offer them,” she said. “It gives them our expertise. It gives them access to our actual experts. They can ask us questions, they can set up phone calls. They can submit long-form research requests – where we will compile pretty involved reports for them on specific topics.”

Potratz said HR EDGE provides customers with a level of compliance that they need to “get by in the HR world that they can’t really get just by Googling or reading a book.”

“It’s a personal connection that we offer through these services,” she said.

Some of the content in HR EDGE, Potratz said, includes:

• Resources for frontline managers – Content designed to help HR professionals teach frontline managers how to avoid common HR mistakes.
• Quick references – A list of related industry programs for a given topic, allowing members to easily see when requirements from other agencies or compliance programs apply.
• How-to guides – Detailed instructions on how to carry out specific HR tasks, such as creating a drug and alcohol policy or recognizing warning signs of workplace violence.
• Interpretations and guidance documents – Simplified explanations of complex HR laws and concepts.

Potratz said HR EDGE brings a new level of expertise to J. J. Keller customers.

“We were able to launch it just before a very large HR conference, so we were able to talk to a lot of customers there,” she said. “They were particularly excited about the large pool of frontline manager content HR EDGE offers.”

Potratz said as she mentioned before, if the HR people don’t have a ton of HR Experience, “the frontline managers have even less.”

“They don’t know what they don’t know,” she said. “Just from court cases and things we see every day in the news, frontline managers are the ones who can run afoul of the law without ever knowing about it. So, that’s been the thing that we’ve heard from our customers that they’re most excited about.”

When it comes to adding services

Kufahl said when it comes to deciding what services to add and when, “we chase what our customers are saying.”

“There have been times where customers have come to us with additional asks in different areas – most notably food safety and healthcare safety – where we thought the time was now to start piloting ourselves in that space,” he said.

Customers’ needs/wants are brought to the table from multiple fronts, Kufahl said, including marketing and editorial.

“We meet as a team quite regularly and discuss (ideas), and roadmap what areas might make sense to pilot some new deliverables in,” he said.

Potratz said J. J. Keller has been hearing from customers for a long time that there was a need for more material and resources for HR professionals.

“HR EDGE was specifically built to address them and give (our customers) resources to tackle some of the bigger challenges that we regularly heard about,” she said. “Like Dustin said, it was something that was customer-driven, and that made us start to explore our options.”

Jersild said it is also about staying relevant to the needs of the market.

“We’re always critically focused on the voice of the customer so that we maintain our value and fulfill our mission and purpose of protecting people and the businesses they run,” she said.

Continued support

As an organization, Kufahl said J. J. Keller is consistently looking for ways to support its customers’ needs – something the company will continue to do.

“We’re going to continue to look at other areas that have complex rules and regulations where customers may need help – again, not only to keep them in compliance from a regulatory standpoint, but also keep their employees safe and healthy,” he said.

One such area that J. J. Keller is already exploring, Kufahl said, is healthcare safety – or more specifically patient safety in the healthcare industry.

“We started involving ourselves in the healthcare safety space as well,” he said. “Very similar to how we’re going about food safety, I hired a consultant in that area. It’s been kind of a slow burn because this was definitely something that we did not have as much expertise in, but we’ve been learning a lot, and it’s been very well received by customers. We’re continuing to push that, and we’re looking to grow that moving forward as well.”

For more on J. J. Keller’s Compliance Network and the new services it supports, visit jjkeller.com.