One thing that continually baffles me when I speak with people who talk to me about Food Safety Certification is their willingness to put their heads in the sand, and hope it all goes away.
For better or for worse, it is here to stay. And it’s growing at an ever increasing rate, reaching right down to the farm level. Pretending it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t affect you, or that you will be able to continue to find markets for your produce without a Food Safety System is an erroneous belief. This has been evidenced in Washington State, where the smaller businesses who ‘couldn’t afford’ food safety certification (for a farm, priced around $1400 per year in audit costs) have been driven to the wall, and either gone out of business, or been acquired by businesses who have adopted certification and have grown as a result.
Those companies still yet to embrace it face an ever shrinking demand for their products as brokers, packhouses, and plants find it more difficult to comply with buyer requests for food safety certificates.
Let’s take the humble apple as our case study - a fruit that ranks as one of the lowest risk products on the market (when sold whole). The question often posed is 'why adopt a food safety certification when food safety is not an issue?' It’s a valid question. The reason here is that major retailers and supermarkets have issued a blanket, across every industry a requirement to be certified.
Why not make low risk products exempt, then? Because the costs of administrating these exemptions, and the risk of people exploiting any loophole, are too high. It’s much simpler for the major retailers and supermarkets to make it an across the board requirement.
Certification As A Method Of Making Money.
The businesses that do adopt food certification have a much stronger chance of remaining competitive against imported produce, which is often not certified. It broadens your markets, and stops your purchasers from going elsewhere.
In these times any cost that does not impact on revenue positively is one that producers can not afford. Food Safety Certification is viewed in this light. But with markets squeezing, Food Safety Certification is increasingly viewed as being revenue positive – i.e. it generates more money than it costs – because it guarantees a market.
And to make the process even easier, organizations do exist to help. One such organization in
