Food Safety Certification

Like taxation and death, obtaining internationally recognised food safety certification has become inevitable for any food business planning to export to Europe and the US. Even Thai businesses trading in the domestic market are finding that many of their customers are starting to insist on certification standards such as BRC, ISO and IFS. In the tough competitive arena of the food industry, certification arms races can break out when one manufacturer obtains ISO 9001 Quality Assurance certification and proudly displays their achievement on their letterheads and in advertising. This first taste of formal recognition for manufacturing standards is like your first cigarette. Before you realise it, you’ve become a heavy user of GMP HACCP Certification and your competitor is getting hooked on the heavy stuff such as ISO 22000 or the BRC Global Standard.

Raising the Bar

Once the initial high has worn off, you find that the Certification Bodies, who operate the schemes, will steadily raise the bar with each new edition of their standard, requiring retraining and ever more complex management systems. Of course your customers will be delighted as their customers are getting enhanced protection and the schemes help to demonstrate that they are a diligent and caring business. They are doubly delighted as all the costs for the schemes are borne by the supplier, unlike in the old days when the retailers had teams of inspectors who checked on their supply base. 

Barrier to Market Entry

So if the schemes help to protect customers and help suppliers to gain export trade, what’s the problem? The main issue is that the increasing complexity of the management systems required by the schemes can be a barrier to market entry for smaller businesses. SME’s in the food industry are often the pioneers of innovation and a healthy, growing SME sector is essential for a developing economy. There’s also an issue of cost that can impact on small and large companies. It’s not so much the direct costs of the schemes, which are often reasonable compared to other forms of management consultancy support, it’s the true costs of management time absorbed by the often over-complex management systems and monitoring schemes.

Lessons from History

To understand the issue of growing complexity and costs associated with food safety certification it may help to delve a little into the dark origins of the schemes. Early in my career, in the days before I’d developed the seniority and cunning to avoid doing any real work, I was involved in the auditing of suppliers for major UK retailers. I was working for a small but fast growing food safety agency that had a healthy business carrying out the inspections and approvals for a range of supermarket retailers and high street restaurant chains. Although our company was showing encouraging growth, we realised that the business model was not really sustainable in the longer term. We found ourselves auditing the same suppliers to different retailer’s standards, sometimes the same supplier would be audited several times a week. The over-worked QA Managers in the food suppliers had become little more than tour guides, showing an endless procession of white-coated inspectors around their plant. One QA Manager even admitted that he had planned out a route populated by his most eloquent and highly trained staff that routed the inspectors via his newest and cleanest machinery. He’d even planted a defective wash hand basin on the route to give the auditors a simple defect to record and report.

At that time a movement started within the industry groups, auditors and standards organisations to develop a single standard for suppliers that could be adopted by all the retailers to avoid the need for multiple inspections under differing schemes.  Getting the fiercely competitive retailers to agree on anything is a monumental task requiring diplomacy, influence, technical brilliance and threats of physical violence, but industry groups such as the British Retail Consortium in the UK and standards organisations such as the IFS in Germany, ISO in Geneva and SQF in Australia managed this challenging task with the support of their members.  The outcome was an agreed national specification for standards and management systems and a single annual audit that would enable a supplier to obtain formal certification to demonstrate compliance to all their customers.

We then had a period where the suppliers and retailers frolicked on the broad sunlit uplands of unified standards and low inspection burdens, but there was a cloud on the horizon. The schemes were essentially national and they had developed in isolation. Competitive pressures and customer demands for authentic ethnic products were driving the retailers to source internationally. The same pressures created the growing issues of food miles and carbon footprints that have made the supermarket retailers the target of green groups throughout the world.

So now the suppliers were again facing multiple food safety schemes together with growing costs and complexity. Coincidentally, there were other factors that were adding to the burden.  The certification schemes had their roots in either the ISO 9000 quality assurance standard or the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) scheme developed by Pillsbury for the NASA space programme. So the schemes were either based on one of the most documentation heavy standards known to mankind or they were, quite literary, ‘rocket science’. These issues were compounded by the growing trend for generalist engineering quality assurance experts to offer food safety certification services. In the absence of a real depth of food industry experience some of these consultants tended to give greater emphasis to the documented ISO 9000 based QA management systems rather than the technical food safety issues related to production. So the scale and complexity of the documentation grew well beyond the actual requirements of the schemes. One example of this issue was spotted by our Thai Technical Head during an audit when she came across a document control system that required the CEO to sign over 350 forms.

Current Developments

So that’s the history, but what of current developments?  The schemes themselves are fundamentally good tools to enhance customer safety and minimise the audit burden for suppliers, so some of the latest developments are encouraging. The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) is a multi-stakeholder scheme to provide mutual recognition for the leading certification standards. So the companies that have signed up to the GFSI will recognise any of the certification schemes approved by GFSI, meaning that a supplier need only achieve one of the GFSI approved schemes. Another development has come from some of the leading certification agencies who now offer combined audits to cover multiple schemes. These are significant developments, but they really only mitigate the inherent issues created by multiple certification schemes.

A real solution would be the merging of the leading schemes into one single international standard, but currently there are few signs that this is likely.

Seven Steps to Certification Heaven

So what practical measures can a supplier take to minimise the burdens and maximise the benefits from a food safety certification scheme?

1. Find out what your customer really needs.  Do not assume that your customer requires full certification; often they only require a recognised HACCP based scheme such as those based on the international Codex standard or the US Cook and Thurber system to demonstrate that you have the basic controls in place.

2. Choose your certification agency carefully. Ensure that the consultant servicing your project is a qualified food safety expert with a depth of food industry experience in a relevant sector.

3. Work with your consultant.  If you leave all the work to the external advisor you will end up with processes and systems that are not practical and do not integrate with your day to day operating procedures.

4. Keep it simple. The best management and monitoring systems are the simplest ones.  Anyone can develop a complex system to match the needs of a certification scheme, but only an experienced consultant working with the people who will be using the system every day can write a simple system.

5. Keep it real. Integrate the management schemes and controls with your existing systems to ensure that you are developing practical tools to enhance your business and not unnecessary burdens and bureaucracy. Traceability systems in particular can often stray into the realms of total fiction. Can you really trace products back to every batch, or is a shift based system more appropriate?

6. Train your people. So that they understand how to run any new systems and the benefits they will bring.

7. Keep the focus on the customer. Never forget that the real aim is to make your products safer for the eventual consumer.