Food
Safety
System
Certification 22000
Market Advantage
Are you selling in a market swamped with fakes? Did your business stop or be disrupted during a food safety scare? Is my product safe from contamination in the marketplace? These are typical questions that drive the thinking behind food safety and security.
The FSSC22000 certification is a visible brand credential of your organization’s commitment to providing quality, safe and genuine food products. In a not-so-ethical world, malicious competitors, copycats, and bootleggers can harm your brand by contaminating your products, tamper, or even produce fakes, taking away your market share. Aftermarket recalls can be costly, not to mention brand damage and loss of customer confidence in your food products. The FSSC 22000 aims to provide a food security framework to address food safety and, more importantly, to prevent food fraud and tighten food defense against malicious agents. An FSSC accredited independent certification body of your choice will assess and validate that your practices and processes meet the food safety system principles to satisfy your most demanding customer. Today, FSSC22000 is recognized by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) as the minimum prerequisite for the food industry.
Is It For Me?
The FSSC22000 is suitable for any size of business in the food supply chain. Whether you are a grower, farmer, processor, producer, wholesaler, or retailer, the principles of food safety, food fraud prevention, and food defense are applicable. These processes are the foundation to securing the integrity of your food products in the marketplace. Expanded from ISO22000, which targets food safety, the FSSC22000 further challenges businesses to secure their processes and products to restrict opportunistic actors or agents motivated by illicit financial gains or ideology to harm from entering the food supply chain.
How Much Time?
From ground zero, it typically requires about 6 months from project kick-off to attaining certification. Why 6 months?. 3 months is for management system development work and another 3 months for implementation. Certification bodies require at least 3 months of implementation data. You can compress the time if you develop and implement concurrently. For businesses upgrading their certification to the latest standard, completion time is about 3 months or less.
You may also need to consider other time dependencies such as staff learning curve, hardware, or software (if applicable) implementation.
How We Can Help
We can assist you in achieving certification from start to completion. Our consultancy program is modularized and flexible. Scroll below to read the highlights of the modules. You have the option to choose all the modules or pick the module that you need help with.
General Training Module
Awareness training is suited to give your team members an overview of the management standard. The learning objective is to understand the application of the management standard towards your business context.
Internal Auditing and auditor training is a critical requirement in the management standard. An annual audit of the implemented Management System is required. The internal audit training module is suited for your team of auditors. The learning objective is to understand the methodology of conducting an internal audit, from planning to reporting audit findings.
Technical Training Module
Managing food safety hazards, food threats, and food fraud vulnerabilities is essential in FSSC22000. The learning objective is to understand the concepts, identify and evaluate the types of food safety hazards and critical control points, food threats, and food fraud vulnerabilities in your business. You will also learn about the HACCP, TACCP and VACCP assessment methodology behind food safety and security risk management.
Some technical knowledge is required to meet essential elements of the standard. Rest assured that there are no complex concepts to grasp or complicated calculations needed.
Risk Inventory Module
Risk management is the cornerstone of the management standards. To a layman, understanding and identifying risk is a complex task. We can help you in this regard by taking over this task. Our risk assessment methodology is aligned with industry codes of practice and is acceptable for certification.
Here is what we will do:
Identify possible food security threats and citical control point (TACCP)
Identify possible fraud vulnerabilities and citical control point (VACCP)
Identify food safety hazards and critical control points (HACCP) in the procurement, manufacturing and logistic processes.
Evaluate the impacts or consequences of each identified risk.
Creating a food safety and food security register highlighting risks and impacts.
Recommend solutions to mitigate significant risks in the Food Defense Plan.
Policy and Procedure Module
Writing down your policies and procedures ensures continuity of practice. We can assist you in formulating your standard operating procedures (SOP). We conduct peer reviews of your SOPs for suitability and practicality in meeting the standard. We will also guide you during the implementation of your SOPs for fulfilling certification requirements.
Pre-Certification
Assessment Module
At the end of the implementation period, we will assess your readiness for the actual certification exercise. We will report and highlight areas for closure and improvements to be made before fixing a date with your appointed certification body.
Post-Certification Module
Our service does not end when your organization is certified. Maintaining the certified system through annual internal audits is mandatory over the three years of certification. If you are short on human resources or skillset, we provide contract internal audit services to help you maintain your certification.
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