fbpx

About Sirocco

Sirocco Food and Wine Consulting specializes in delivering technical consulting services including Food Safety Management System implementation (Canadian PCP Plans, HACCP, SQF, FSMA Preventive Controls for Human Food) as well as Sensory Testing of food, wine, and other beverages. We focus on science and best practices to provide value to our clients.

Mission + Core Values

Sirocco Food and Wine Consulting believes in continuous improvements to achieve service quality and customer satisfaction. We strive to provide value to our customers through confidentiality, respect, integrity, openness, and commitment.

sirocco-food-safety-consulting-wine-industry-applied-sensory-research-services-2

Meet Sirocco’s Expert, Karine Lawrence

Karine Lawrence, Founder and Principal Consultant of Sirocco Food + Wine Consulting, has worked for the wine and food industry for over 20 years and brings expertise in Food Safety, Sensory Analysis and Regulatory Compliance. Since the inception of Sirocco Food + Wine Consulting in 2014, she has provided research and consulting services to food and wine industry stakeholders in Canada and the United States. Karine’s specialty is SQF and HACCP certification programs. Her wine research projects have been published in Consumer Science and Strategic Marketing: Case Studies in the Wine Industry (Woodhead Publishing, 2019). Current partnerships include working with the BC Beverage Technology Access Centre. She is a Lead FSPCA instructor (human Food) and Certified SQF Trainer & Consultant. Karine holds a Master of Food Science degree as well as a diplôme d’ingénieur (specialized in agri-food industries). She is a certified HACCP professional and a BC VQA Wine Assessor/WSET Level 2 Certificate Holder.

Meet a Collaborator of Sirocco, Sean Xia

Sean Xia is currently working in the seafood industry as an operations manager. With a master’s degree in food science, strong quality assurance skills and 7 years of hands-on experience in the quality assurance and operations field, Sean provides insights into the development and maintenance of food safety management systems with an operational point of view. Sean believes that a successful quality assurance system must be well integrated to the business supply chain and inventory management systems. Combined with the adoption of lean manufacturing principles, a quality/food safety management system should help improve the company’s objectives while meeting regulatory requirements. With years of experience working with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), Sean understands the principles of developing and implementing an effective preventive control program. Sean is familiar with HACCP and GFSI certification schemes, as well as Kosher, Organic, Oceanwise and BAP certification requirements.

Meet Felicia Loo

Felicia Loo is a Certified Food Scientist (CFS) and Certified SQF Consultant. She has worked in quality assurance, regulatory and product management for food and natural health products for the past 6 years. She has experience working with multiple food safety compliances and voluntary certification schemes such as SQF, FSSC 22000, CFIA, Health Canada, Organic, Kosher and Halal. Felicia has graduated from the University of British Columbia with BSc in Food Science with a Minor in Commerce.

Meet Sofia Copado

With a BSc in Food Science, Sofia Copado has been working in the food industry in Canada since 2013. Her roles have covered new product Research and Development, Quality Assurance and SQF Systems. Over the years, Sofia has implemented food safety and quality control programs for various food processing operations. She has helped businesses achieve and sustain certifications including SQF, HACCP, Organic and Gluten Free. She has a broad experience in Project Management, research, Product Development, Regulatory Compliance and CFIA label reviews including Nutrition Facts tables, special claims, allergen and ingredient declarations. Sofia is fluent in English and Spanish.

Gain the knowledge & skills to develop a food safety plan that meets FDA’s Preventive Control Human Food requirements.

View Our Upcoming Courses

Sirocco is the expert that provides your company with:

  • Consistent Quality Products.
  • Consumer Confidence.
  • New Market Opportunities.
  • Long-term Money Saving.
  • Ensured compliance with Law and Regulation.
  • Reduce Risk of Product Recalls.
  • Organization to Food Management Processes.
  • Knowledgeable and Accountable Staff.

Sirocco will help your business succeed with consulting, training and implementation of:

What Clients Are Saying

“We contacted Sirocco Food + Wine Consulting” to prepare various evaluation protocols for the sensory profiling of our fair trade cocoa beans and chocolate. Finished products were also assessed using the Tastel web sensory software. Karine developed an aroma wheel for our products which we now use to support Marketing and Sales. Our next step is to train an internal sensory panel so that we are able to track the sensory quality of our cocoa beans and chocolate.”

I have had the pleasure of working with Karine for over a year now. She helped our company pass our first SQF audit Ed. 8.1 with a score of 94. For our recertification audit, which was on SQF Ed. 9.0, Karine visited our site and performed a gap assessment. She was able to identify a lot of areas for improvement and with her help our company passed the audit and achieved a score of 96. Karine is really knowledgeable on SQF. She is easy to work with and extremely helpful.

“We have been working with Karine Lawrence for about 8 months as we work to achieve our HACCP certification. She has been such a great support for us; providing training for our HACCP team and being present to answer our questions. She has so much knowledge on food safety requirements and has been able to provide us with resources to ensure that we have strong programs in place. Early in the process she conducted a gap assessment of our programs and the facility, which helped us identify the areas that we had to improve on. We feel confident that we will successfully reach our food safety goals. Thank you for all your guidance throughout this process.”

“This is to tell everyone that we have been dealing with Karine Lawrence for 2 years in doing our HACCP Plan & PCP importer plan for our wholesale company and it has been a pleasure dealing with her. She is hardworking, organized, passionate, intelligent and truly knowledgeable and knows how to accommodate our personal needs. Without her knowledge, guidance and expertise, we could not have finished our PCP plan/HACCP plan in time. Because of her, we are now fully compliant and very safe in running our wholesale food business. We are blessed to know Karine and without her, we would not be where we are today in our business.”

“Karine was a wonderful instructor. She was thorough and ensured we understood content before moving on rather than trying to rush through things to follow the course schedule. She was engaging and asked a lot of questions, appreciating all of our different backgrounds and ideas.”

“ The instructor (Karine Lawrence) was extremely knowledgeable and the class was enjoyable” “This course (SQF 9 System Implementation taught by Karine Lawrence) definitely increased my knowledge and understanding of SQF.”
We would like to express how grateful we are to have found Sirocco Consulting. We were a week away from our first ever SQF desk audit when we decided to purchase the SQF Templates Bundle from Sirocco. We had about 60% of our procedures in place but were able to rely on Sirocco’s template to cover the rest. The SOPs and Forms provided by Sirocco were detailed and covered all requirements of the SQF code.  We did not have any non-conformities on procedures that we implemented using the templates provided by Sirocco. After the desk audit we continued to work with Karine. A month and a half later we passed our first SQF site audit with only 6 minor non-conformities. This would not have been possible without Sirocco Consulting. Thank you from the team at Blue Ocean.
I would like to take this opportunity to express how very satisfied I was to receive and work with the Sirocco SQF bundle.  What a time saver! The templates are very easy to use and adjust to make your own. They saved me countless hours of work, guiding me through the necessary steps and gave my program a cohesive professional look. One can become overwhelmed with the volumes of paperwork that is needed for SQF and HACCP.  The Sirocco SQF bundle definitely lightened that load and combined with Karine's expertise, I couldn't be happier. Highly recommended.
I am very happy with the service Sirocco provided us. Karine and Sean are amazing food scientists/experts!  They are super knowledgeable and respond in such a timely manner when I need the support urgently with my seafood business. I cannot thank them enough for their help. Highly recommended!

Karine, […] I just wanted to thank you for the work you did on our PCP [plan]. We were audited by CFIA in November and did very well.

We were in a situation that required that we get an SQF Certification in a very short period of time. Sirocco Consulting provided us with the templates we needed and talked us through the process. No doubt without them we could not have achieved receiving our certification in the allotted time. Karine was our consultant and she made the process understandable and much less daunting than it would have been otherwise. I highly recommend Sirocco Consulting to any company that needs a third-party audit. It was one of the best investments we made in our trek to become third-party certified. We are counting on significant return on investment having achieved this milestone in our growth. Thanks Sirocco!
More Testimonials

Questions? Ready to get started? Drop us a line!

Contact Sirocco