Harmonisation of food standards: a step closer
20th September 2007 by Cor Groenveld
Five years ago I stated at several conference presentations that I hoped that my grand children would experience the day that all the different food standards would be harmonised. Today I am much more positive and say that I think that my children and even I will meet that day! The reason for this is that there are a number of concrete developments that can influence the harmonisation of standards positive.
There are more than 100 food safety and quality standards in the food supply chain and a lot of food manufactures have to be certified against a number of them. IFS, ISO-22000, BRC, GMP animal feed, FAMI QS, Dutch HACCP, SQF 2000, EurepGap: you name it. And all of these standards have a lot of the same requirements what means that audits, certification and the reporting of this often result in duplication of work (and extra costs). Next to this food manufacturers are often audited by their clients and food authorities what means that in some cases only the guiding of all these audits takes 100 days per year.
Why didn’t we find a way to harmonise these standards? The first reason is that the different stakeholders have different requirements. And that is understandable. We will not be able to develop one standard that contains all requirements and needs of all stakeholders in the whole supply chain. But looking at all these standards you will find that they have a number of requirements in common and that is the key for successful harmonisation.
Almost all of the standards contain of three parts: requirements for HACCP, requirements for management systems and requirements for specific Good Practices (or Pre-requisite Programmes). The first two parts are in most cases the same. The difference lies in the third part, the specific good practices. These requirements are sector specific and often also client specific.
What we see today is that stakeholders start to recognise the need and advantages for harmonisation and that they take initiatives to achieve this.
The first one is the development of ISO-22000. This standard is a generic standard for Food Safety Management Systems that can be used by all organisations in the food supply chain. It is a state of the art standard developed by HACCP experts from 25 countries. The strength of ISO-22000 is that it is not sector specific and it provides tools to manage food safety and to achieve supply chain assurance. The difference of ISO-22000 with a lot of other standards is that it requires a food manufacturer to have good practices / pre-requisite programmes in place but it does not have a list specifically stating them. And to be honest, it is impossible to make this list for all sectors and covering all specific stakeholders requirements.
The second one is the fact that 7 large global retailers decided that they accept certificates against any of the 4 GFSI (Global Food Safety Initiative) approved standards. The GFSI is an initiative of global supermarkets who developed a bench mark model to review an approve food safety standards. 6 years ago their motto was: “certified once, accepted everywhere”. But that promising statement did not work because a large number of retailers required a specific approval. The fact that the 7 retailers (Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, Migros, Metro, Ahold and DelHaize) accept any of then certificates is a step forward in the harmonisation process.
The third one is an initiative of 4 of the largest food manufacturers, Kraft, Unilever, Danone and Nestlé. They see ISO-22000 as the tool for an effective food safety management system. But the retailers are not yet in favour or ISO-22000 because it misses the specific list with good practices. The solution provided by the G4 of the food manufacturers is that they developed together a document covering these sector specific good practices. This provides the possibility that when a food manufacturer meets ISO-22000 and the list of sector specific good practices that they meet the requirements of the retailers. And looking further: also for other sectors (e.g. packaging materials, animal feed agricultural sector) it is possible to develop such a sector specific document. This approach will achieve a global harmonisation of food safety standards by using ISO-22000 as the generic standard for food safety management in alls sectors and additional a standard with sector specific requirements. The G4 developed the draft of the document and are now in the process of having it formalised and publicly available.
As you can see, there are positive developments in the area of harmonisation of food safety standard. And this is really needed to improve food safety in the whole chain and to avoid unnecessary costs in the field of auditing and certification.
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 [...]