About

Sirocco Food and Wine Consulting specializes in delivering technical consulting services including Food Safety Management System implementation (HACCP, SQF, FSEP, 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.

Meet Sirocco’s Expert, Karine Lawrence

Karine Lawrence, Owner and Principal Consultant, has worked for the wine and food industry for over 20 years and brings an extensive working knowledge in Food Safety, Sensory Evaluation of food and wine, and Quality Management. 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 holds a Master of Food Science degree as well as a diplôme d’ingénieur (specialized in agri-food industries). Karine’s teaching credentials include being a Lead FSPCA instructor (human Food), Certified SQF Trainer Consultant and Wine educator at Okanagan College (Penticton Campus). She is a certified HACCP professional and a member of the Society of Sensory Professionals.

Meet a Collaborator of Sirocco, Dereje Bezabih

Dereje Bezabih (Ph.D.) has worked as a Quality Assurance team member in Beverage and Natural Health Product Manufacturing companies, before holding his current position of Agricultural Scientist. In the past three years, Dereje has been collaborating with Sirocco to develop several HACCP Projects for small and medium food companies. Dereje holds a Ph.D. degree in Horticulture, with a research in the post-harvest food quality of horticultural crops. Moreover, he completed a one year course from the M.Sc. Program called ‘Safety in the Food Chain’ in an Austrian University before he earned his Master of Food Science degree from the University of British Columbia.

Meet Darcen Esau

Darcen is a market researcher specializing in both consumer behavior and sensory evaluation. With over a decade of experience designing and implementing research studies, he is currently working at the University of British Columbia Okanagan to better understand the sensory experience of wine and how this impacts consumer decision making.
Previously, as the Associate Vice President at Ipsos, he designed and implemented consumer behavior and product understanding studies for clients throughout North America. As an experienced moderator and facilitator, this included dozens of qualitative projects, including focus groups, IDI’s, shop-alongs, and ethnographies. Additionally, he has designed and conducted dozens of quantitative studies, many of which utilize advanced analytics like Implicit Association, TURF, Discrete Choice Modelling and MaxDiff.
As a Panel Leader for Sensory Spectrum Inc., he led descriptive analysis panels to understand the sensory experience of consumer products, a skillset he continues to implement with wine panel research across Canada.

Meet Ketki Mehta

Ketki Mehta is the Founder, and Consultant, of Ketki International LLC. She brings the wide-ranging experience of 18 years of all aspects of the food industry, from the microbiology of safe food preservation to the exploration of new food markets to legal compliance issues within international trade.  She handles FDA regulatory and compliance issues and has served and trained may small and big size companies internationally and has interacted with the FDA and other international regulatory bodies. Ketki completed her Food Technology from India and Master of Laws in Food and Agriculture Law from Vermont Law School and is an FSPCA lead instructor for FSMA Preventive controls and Foreign supplier verification program. During her Masters program she interned with Texas State Department of Health Services in Food safety and consumer protection division and was trained with FDA on various compliance and investigation programs.

Ketki Mehta

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

I would like to thank both of you for organizing & presenting this informative valuable training for Food Industry Professionals within the QA Sector. With the SFCR enactment recently, I have gained valuable insight on the expectations of CFIA along with the opportunities & grants  that are available from the “Post - Farm Food Safety Program through your presentation.
Also, Ketki’s presentation on compliance with the FSMA-“Foreign Supplier Verification” gave me valuable information on the expectations of the “Importer” from the “supplier” with regards to pertinent documents associated to food products being exported to the US.
Thanks once again  for all you support.
We contacted Sirocco Consulting after scoring lower than desired on a SQF 8.0 audit. Karine visited our plant and did a gap assessment. We found her efficient and helpful and used her guidance to get our CARs addressed. Subsequently, we hired Karine to return and train our key personnel on the FSPCA course. Again, we appreciate her knowledge and ability to teach in efficiently. I would recommend Sirocco to anyone needing help building their food safety program. Read More
We just had a gap assessment conducted in preparation for our SQF audit. We developed our written program with the help of Sirocco Food and Wine Consulting. These templates are terrific and easy to implement. The SQF consultant who performed the document review was very impressed with the quality of the procedures and record templates. Knowing that our written documents meet the standard, we feel that we are in a good position to pass our SQF audit and obtain our certification.
As a worldwide importer, in-house re-packager, and direct supplier of over 200 diverse food and dietary supplement ingredients, we faced significant compliance challenges surrounding FSMA, FSVP, and dietary supplement GMP, on top of customer requirements for GFSI compliance.  We interviewed multiple food safety consultants prior to choosing Karine Lawrence at Sirocco, and we couldn’t be happier with our choice— Karine’s FSPCA PCQI Lead Instructor, certified SQF trainer/consultant, auditing and R&D background among other experience was the perfect match for our needs.  She took a practical, entity-based approach in helping us design and implement a comprehensive SQF Edition 8 QMS tailored to effectively and efficiently manage our risks and compliance requirements, while keeping the customer service and operational aspects of our business a priority.  We were impressed with both the form and function of her modern SOP and document sets, as well as all the detail HACCP, risk assessment and other diligence she performed, including working within our cloud-based document management/FSVP software system.  Now we’re receiving “Excellent” audit scores and are delivering better value to our customers than ever.  Sirocco was a great choice!
We worked with Sirocco Food & Wine Consulting to get our FSVP. Karine was great to work with. She was very helpful and always got back to us promptly with any questions we had. I would recommend Sirroco to anyone working on getting their FSVP.
What I appreciated about the course taught by Karine and Sirocco, was that it was organized and well presented. Each day had hands on situations presented that could be worked out by the teams as well as volumes of information at hand. This allowed good participation and dialogue about situations and these discussions could lead to real time questions that we could ask as well and work through as needed. It was a good few days of intense learning and exchange.
I got a better understanding of the Food Safety Plan required for FSMA from this [FDA’s Preventive Controls Human Food] training. Karine has skillfully conducted the training as she provided fact-based examples and links to additional resources to help first-timers build an FSP.  Karine was a wonderful trainer with her knowledge of the subject matter and extensive experience in food safety.
I attended the FSPCA Preventive Controls (Human Food)/PCQI course offered in Vancouver, British Columbia. Course materials were good, the mentoring approach was good, and working with other people in group setting made the course content much clearer. Karine Lawrence, the PCQI instructor did a good job of communicating and... Read More
I recently attended the training session for PCQI (Preventive Controls Qualified Individual) required by the FDA for food exporters and U.S. food processing facilities. Karine Lawrence presented a clear view of the requirements and provided good practical example on how to implement them. She worked her way though the extensive manual in a... Read More
Karine Lawrence of Sirocco Consulting was the best choice we could have made when preparing for our first GFSI audit at Libre Naturals.  Karine’s vast knowledge of food manufacturing best practices and auditing code combined with her calm and patient approach brought much needed structure to what can be a very stressful experience... Read More
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