>Inspector visits the "dirty" bigCo factory and they have an expensive binder for him showing him why everything they do he could possibly take issue is "compliant", citing relevant law, guidelines, specs, etc, etc. Inspector visits the squeaky clean small time factory and proceeds to write out thousands of dollars of fines for petty things that could have been compliant had the owners had the money to pay to produce all the paperwork showing why their stuff is GTG.

>And the inspector and everyone his organization works for say this is all great, and of course they've got self-serving metrics to prove it, because those organizations naturally fill up with people who don't question the premises of what they're doing.

I've been through dozens of FDA facility inspections (and dozens more from non-governmental inspection agencies that are regularly used in the food industry, some of which I might say are more strict than the FDA). Nothing you've said matches my experience in any way.

I'm being dramatic here but we both know it's basically how things work at the margin.

When there's a question of a gray area and "compliance by letter but not spirit" type things the BigCo solution that has been engineered and/or gone over by lawyers, etc, etc. almost always wins out even if their hired people have to go a few rounds with the regulator and make some minor tweak to make it happen. A lot of times this is fine and it's common sense progress that the regulator was preventing because of institutional inertia but sometimes it's sketchy slapdash stuff.

My food industry experience is on the "manufacturing the stuff in the factory" side and I assure you nobody who arrives in any of the nondescript white trucks with numbers on them regards the regulatory process as highly as you do.