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Cor Groenveld reports from day 2 of the GIFSQ event
12th November 2010 by Cor Groenveld
CIFSQ Event – November 2010 – Day Two podcast blog from Cor Groenveld, Global Product Manager Food at LRQA.
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Hello. Today it is the second day of the China Food Conference and Quality Conference in Shanghai and I’d like to give you an update of the second day. If you have read or listened to my update of yesterday, you know that I am attending this conference and today I had to do a presentation. I must say it’s still very fascinating here, its unbelievable when you see the conference, I mean there are still the traditional things in China, but also especially in a city like Shanghai you can see the fast development of this country. And that’s why of course the control of risks is very important and this is what this conference is about, it’s about food safety.
Today I attended two break-out sessions, the first one this morning was the session where I had to do my presentation. It was named the Global Food Safety Trends. It was chaired by Catherine Francois and she is the Director of the Global Food Safety Initiative, the GFSI. It was interesting to hear as an example of the co-operation between industry and government, not only in China but all over the world. It’s important that governments work more closely together with industry and make sure that they together identify the right compromises and also have the programs in place to make sure that food suppliers are making safe foods. There was also a representative from Pepsi, PepsiCo, and he was specifically talking about how to control chemical hazards. He talked about risk assessments needed to identify the hazards, but also the maximum acceptable levels of those hazards and from there putting effective compromises in place.
My presentation was about Global Developments in Auditing and Certification. I talked about the food supply chain concerns, and of course most important is still food safety, but we see also that other concerns become more and more important. Consumers and also retailers, they want sustainable food, they want the manufacturers to have corporate responsibility in place, but also that we are taking care of the environment, and that you take care of risks like bioterrorism, animal welfare, child labour. All kinds of examples where food safety management systems have to make sure that these risks are covered. An integrated risk based approach that is what is needed to make sure that those risks are managed.
I also showed what kind of private standards and certification we have, and I talked about the GFSI, the Global Food Safety Initiative. The Global Food Safety Initiative, I think it is now running for 10 years, they have done a great job in achieving more harmonisation in the food supply chain towards certification and standards. But what we see is a little work for us on there. I mean the slogan of the Global Food Safety Initiative was ‘certified once, accepted everywhere’ and we have already achieved a lot in that field but we still see that there are a lot of different standards and a lot of different certification schemes and that sometimes clients in the food supply chain require different certificates, so there is still work to be done.
Specifically I talked about FSSC 22000, that’s the certification scheme covering ISO 22000 and the PAS 220. It is a new scheme and we see that the global food manufacturers are using it already. It is now out and the first certificates are issued, the website shows which organisations are certified, and also what we see is that FSSC will be using a new standard, ISO22002. The first accreditations are expected 1st January 2011, but the certificates that are issued now are already approved by the Global Food Safety Initiative.
I ended with some thoughts about solutions for harmonisation, still a very important issue towards audits and certification. Interesting is that ISO is developing a series of documents for all parts of the supply chain, for all sectors, and they will be in the series of 22002/1 etc. So what we see is that ISO22000 can be the generic standard for food safety management systems, and that for the specific sectors you can use one of those 22002 documents, that also might help to achieve better harmonisation of standards and certification.
In the afternoon I joined the session chaired by Jan Kranghand. Jan Kranghand is working for Metro, and Metro is a large supermarket and cash & carry company but they also have the medium markets and they sell also consumer products like electronics. They are very large here in China, and companies like Metro but also other retailers and global manufacturers they want to control their supply chain. The standard assurance programs are very important for them to protect their own brand but also to protect their clients, and that is why they need good systems in place, good audits, and good standard assurance programs.
In the session Catherine Francois talked about GFSI. She showed that GFSI will issue a new version of the guidance documents on a short term. The guidance documents, these are the requirements for certification schemes. If a certification scheme wants to be recognised by the GFSI it has to meet the requirements in the guidance document. She also showed that at this moment there are 12 certification schemes recognised by the GFSI, one of them is FSSC, but we see also that there are a number of other certification schemes.
Last but not least, Jan Kranghand talked about managing food safety in less developed businesses. There’s a working group, the working group is part of the GFSI, and that has developed a model that can be used by less developed businesses, so that in a number of months they can achieve the level of the GFSI recognised standards.
Next to those break-out sessions and formal presentations, it’s always good to talk with people on conferences and I talk with many people, one of my conversations I found very interesting, it was a representative of Safe Food International and Safe Food International is an umbrella organisation for consumer organisations. And we talked about the fact that there is still a lot of things to be done, there are figures from the World Health Organisation saying that 1.5 billion cases of diarrhoea happening every year are children under 5 years, now from these cases 1.8 million children die and when you see those figures then it’s unbelievable. So, I started my presentation saying I believe that our food has never been as safe as it is today, and I really mean that, manufacturers, retailers, they’ve all invested a lot of time and money to ensure safe foods, a lot of effort to achieve that, but we still have a lot of things to do, we are never finished with that. I would advise you to go to the website of Safe Food International, www.safefoodinternational.com and there you will find interesting information, for instance some documents that she gave me, its guidelines for consumer organisations to promote national food safety systems, and it’s all about consumers, we do it for the consumers.This was a very good conference and I think I can summarise it for China but also I think for a lot of other countries, what is needed to make sure that we improve food safety. First of all we need training, training is absolutely a very important part to make sure that food companies are on the right level. We need science, science has to help us to address the potential hazards, especially also to identify a maximum acceptable levels. We need to work together, all stakeholders involved in food safety, authorities, manufacturers, retailers, certification bodies, they have to work together. And last but not least, we have to work strongly on harmonisation, we have too many certificates and too many audits, and when we harmonise I think we can achieve that the audit we are doing has the integrity it needs to have.
I found it a very good conference. We had participants from all stakeholders in the supply chain, authorities, manufacturers, retailers, people from university science, certification and accreditation bodies. Most delegates came from China, but also many other Asian countries had representatives here, and also we saw a lot of people from Australia, Europe and America. China is an exciting country, it’s an exciting country that is rapidly developing, and I can assure you that there is a very high focus for food safety here.
So I hope that you enjoyed this update for the second day and of course I hope that we will see or speak to each other somewhere in the future. One of the events that might be interesting to you is the next GFSI, Global Food Safety Conference, it will be held in 2011, February 16th or 18th in London. LRQA, our company will also be there, we will also organise a breakfast session, so if you would like to meet us, please come, but you can always mail us, you can always contact us.
Let me not forget how great the food in China is. I took the opportunity to take a few pictures when I was eating here and it’s absolutely unbelievable what rich kitchen, different food and spices they have, lets make sure that they keep it safe.
Thank you for your attention and hope to speak to or see you soon again.
Cor Groenveld is the Global Product Manager for the food services of Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance Ltd. (LRQA) . He has a degree in Food Technology and worked for 10 years in the food industry before joining LRQA. His background includes being a Quality Assurance Manager, working in product development and production as well as [...]