NCSI Americas making training more accessible to your organization.

For 2011 we’re pleased to announce our most recent initiative – a single low cost for training that covers your access to any training course ran by NCSI Americas, including HACCP, GlobalGAP, BRC, SQF and Internal Auditor Training.

One low annual cost

Any staff member (up to three per course)

Attend as many training courses ran by NCSI Americas as you need

The cost? US$1500 per year to meet all of your training needs.

Food Safety Training courses typically cost around $500 per course, per person, so we're excited at the substantial savings this program will bring in meeting your training requirements.

So give us a call or send us an email.

1 877 285 6554

info@ncsiamericas.com

www.ncsiamericas.com

Inhouse training classes and Lead Auditor Training, are excluded from this program.

NQA West Coast Quality Conference

Wednesday, January 26, 2011 ‐ Los Angeles, CA

NQA is bringing its expertise to LA with a one‐day quality conference covering the hottest issues in process and product compliance. Industry and auditing veterans will provide the insight you need to help your company achieve success. Attend this complimentary event to experience the quality and expertise that NQA offers its clients as an innovative solution provider in the management systems certification industry.

NCSI Americas, as a partner of NQA, is heading up a 90 minute presentation titled 'The True Cost of Food Safety: Choosing a GFSI Food Safety Certification'.

For any questions about the conference please contact NCSI Americas - we'd love to see you there!

30th Annual NW Food Safety and Sanitation Workshop and Exhibit Show

The 30th Annual NW Food Safety and Sanitation Workshop and Exhibit Show is about to kick off on November 9 – 10, 2010 at the Sheraton Portland Airport Hotel in the Mt. Hood Ballroom.

It promises to be another great turnout of Northwest food processing sanitation specialists.\

NCSI Americas are proud to be a sponsor and would love to see you drop by our booth at number 19-20. We hope to see you there!

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.