LRQA Business Assurance looks at The Future of Food Safety Audits and Certification
02/17/2012
Blog post: Cor Groenveld, Global Product Manager for Food Services at LRQA
I would like to talk about the trends in the food supply chain – mainly related to audits and certification. I think the organizations in the food supply chain are ready now to harmonize. Manufacturers and retailers see the benefits of a harmonized approach and they are more and more willing to work together. This is essential because this is the only way to achieve harmonization.
So what we see now is that the international standard ISO 22000 is making excellent progress. Specially FSSC 22000, the GFSI recognized certification scheme using ISO 22000 and a sector specific technical specification for prerequisite programs. This scheme started a few years ago and they have a thousand certificates at this moment. And this growth is expected to increase rapidly as they have extended the scope of certification from food to also packaging material. And the next sector they will ad to the scheme is animal feed.
Another important development – and this is very critical in the food supply chain – is control of suppliers, especially suppliers in emerging / developing markets. In countries like Russia, India and China, there is a focus on food safety but the challenge is to ensure the local suppliers are also on the same minimum level of food safety. In a lot of cases there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to achieve this. We see that manufacturers and retailers are working together now to improve this, as this is a mutual interest. GFSI is facilitating this process by having developed a free available Global Markets Toolkit that can be used by these local suppliers to do a self analysis on their level of food safety ensurance and it provides them the opportunity to be audited against minimum food safety requirements and finally to get a GFSI recognised certificate. In my point of view these are a number of very important and positive trends and developments in the food supply chain
I believe that the improvements in standards and certification as harmonization, a system / process-based audit approach and robust, integer assessment means that there is a growing feeling of optimism amongst key stakeholders. We are still not there but a lot has been achieved. And may we think of a future of a few, (or even one?) standards and certification schemes delivered by fully competent assessors that work to a clearly defined set of criteria that directly link to food safety objectives and perhaps even corporate and social objectives? A few years ago I did say in presentations that I hoped my grand children would meet that day. But now I think that the conditions are there to achieve that my children and even you and I will meet that day!
Cor Groenveld, Global Product Manager for Food Services at LRQA and Chairman of the Foundation for Food Safety Certification