Nefoods

Northeast Foods is part of the H&S Family of Bakeries, including H&S Bakery and Schmidt Baking Company headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. Company culture has complete ignorance when it comes to Quality Assurance, Quality Control and Food Quality Systems. The company owner, Steve Paterakis, had absolutely no concept nor respect with Quality and that ignorance is well felt and filtered down to directors, managers, supervisors and employees. What is constantly pushed and spotlighted are production and profit. The company hires "Quality Managers" to each facility but basically their presence is to appease and satisfy clients, customers, media and 3rd party auditors. Company culture has no respect for QA. Quality Managers are given the responsibility to oversee facilities that had repeated HACCP and GMP violations resulting in overwhelming Customer Complaints. They are fighting fires with no gear and no extinguishers! Violations and complaints had to be disregarded because there was no budget to repair infractions. The quality solution is basically to band-aid severe wounds or just cross our fingers and hope for the best. It was clear that Quality takes a backseat because during the 2008 recession, they quickly let go their Quality Systems Director (Bruce Holder) of 10 years.