NCSI Americas delivers first two pilot audits for the Harmonized Standard

The Harmonized standard effort has received a major kick along, with NCSI Americas recently delivering the first two audits against this standard.

With the standard currently in a published draft form, United Fresh has been pushing for pilot audits to be conducted against volunteer organizations. Bluebird, a growing and packing operation in Washington state, has been kind enough to volunteer two of their sites for the pilot audits to go ahead.

The audits proceeded smoothly, and several areas for improvement in the GAP standard have been identified.

Ideally now other certification bodies and produce organizations will also help in piloting the standard.

The Harmonized GAP standard is a combined industry effort to merge all existing produce standards into one, making it easily accessible and accepted by the USDA and all retailers.

United Fresh Harmonization Standard Effort Nears Completion

The effort spear-headed by United Fresh to create a unified and harmonized GAP standard is drawing to a close, after the Technical Working Group completed both the pre-farm gate, and post-farm gate sections of the standard on October 22, 2010.

This signifies the end of the regular monthly working meetings to compile the standards, and efforts will now shift to piloting the standard and working out a framework for the standard to be managed.

NCSI Americas, in association with Costco and the Washington Horticultural Association, was the first organization to pilot the standard at a pre-farm gate level. This pilot was conducted October 15, 2010, on one of Bluebird Inc. orchards. Having previously gone through a GlobalGAP audit the week before, the site was well prepared and the audit went very smoothly. Several recommendations have been made to alter the standard.

NCSI Americas is also pleased to announce, in association with Costco and the Washington Horticultural Association, that an additional pilot of the standard will be ran of the post-farm gate section at one of Bluebird's packing facilities. The pilot is planned to run November 5, 2010 and will be led by Brett Holman.

Our thanks go out to everyone involved in the process, and especially to Larry Blakely at Bluebird for allowing us to test the standard out with them multiple times.

Full details will be available shortly, courtesy of United Fresh.

The True Cost Of Food Safety Certification

"Food Safety is a direct cost to your bottom line."

Sound familiar?

Under no circumstances would I try and convince anyone that committing to Food Safety is an inexpensive operation. It's fraught with cost, including time. How much time, and how much money does it cost?

Well that's going to depend on your organization. You generally want to allow up to 6 months to prepare if you intend to do everything in-house, and someone will need to be spending at least half their time on food safety.

But what about the cost of not doing food safety?

As retailers look to minimize their exposure by ensuring that their suppliers meet a benchmarked standard, we've seen companies that have adopted food safety certification move to the forefront of the marketplace, gaining market share as they've found more markets to sell into. Put simply, food safety certification is not necessarily just all a cost - but can add real value to your business.

That point aside - what if a food safety issue does occur? Food Safety hones your organizations recall procedures, and ensures that any food safety issue is recalled off the market in a timely manner - minimizing company financial exposure and physical exposure from consumers.

Food Safety has a number of preventative measures as well, inherent in Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP's). After all, if your organization is involved in a recall, no doubt that will cost money - but how much more will it cost the entire industry as consumers change their shopping habits away from the affected products?

In competitive markets, can organizations afford not to embrace food safety, and an top of that, the means to verify the food safety system is in effect through certification? The cost of not adopting food safety is one that is far too great a cost for the industry to bare.

Now that I've successfully scared people reading this, let's look on the bright side. By adopting Food Safety, organizations are embracing a pro-active approach to reduce costs in the long run, by minimizing food safety related recalls and guaranteeing markets to sell to.

NCSI Americas To Begin To Offer PrimusGFS Certification

PrimusGFS is a scored style audit, which has definite appeal to many food safety managers in the marketplace. NCSI Americas is pleased to announce that it will become only the second Certification Body to be able to offer this standard.

This will help provide competition in the marketplace for this standard, and we're excited to be able to offer it.

Previously, companies had to go through PrimusLabs for this standard.

How To Become An Auditor

Many people are interested in becoming a management systems auditor, and we have many that approach us everyday. It's an entirely good thing as there is a shortage of auditors in the industry.

The problem is that not every person interested in auditing has the background that would be accepted by standards owners. A minimum of 5 years is preferred in your relevant industry before you are able to audit in that area. This ensures that the auditors being used have a detailed working knowledge of their industry and know what to look for. There's no point an auditor coming from the apple industry, and being asked to audit a factory making bottle water.

Once it has been established that you possess the relevant background work experience, the training to become an auditor can take up to 12 months to complete. This is an incredible expense for any business to wear.

How To Become An Auditor

1. Have background experience in a relevant industry

2. Do some training - HACCP training, SQF training, BRC training etc. Make yourself employable as an auditor by showing some interest in the subject

3. Do a lead-auditor course (either BRC or RAB-QSA) - this is an approx. 4 day course that trains a prospective auditor in a range of different areas

4. Contact a Certification Body with these details in hand - if you can show you have done the training already, it's much more likely a Certification Body will be willing to perform the shadow audits, submit the paperwork to the standards owners, and give a sign off.

And with those 4 things done, I would be very confident that any Certification Body would be happy to take you on board.

Food Safety – Here To Stay.

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 Washington State is GRAS2P – the growers response to food safety. GRAS2P is part of the Washington Horticultural Association. For a fee they will provide you with training, and all the documents required. They will then take you through to Certification – making the entire process simple, and cost effective.

Certification Isn't That Expensive...

Ahem, before people start throwing rocks at me, let me qualify that statement somewhat. Certification isn't that expensive, at least not in comparison with the costs involved in having a designated member of staff (or more, depending on the size and scope of your operations) responsible for maintaining and overseeing a management system.

In some large operations, it can be a team of people. In smaller to mid-sized firms, it can often be someone already juggling other duties, and always does seem to fall with the person already responsible for Quality Assurance (not necessarily a bad thing - they do know production extremely well).

Compared to these costs, the certification service itself is cheap. Whenever companies approach certification for the first time, this is one thing we always warn them about - the money you pay for certification will not be your major expense, but rather, your highest costs will be with staff time.

The other major point to consider is will certification mean your business will be able to grow on to bigger and better things? A GFSI benchmarked certification (usually SQF or BRC) is usually necessary to trade with the major retailers these days, such as Wal-Mart, Costco or any of the local chains. Will the costs of certification (and all the associated indirect costs of peoples time) be outweighed by the value of having a larger market to sell to?

That's not a question we can answer for you, but it is a question we ask our clients all the time - will being certified help you remain competitive, attract new clients, and increase revenue?