Industry unites to strengthen food safety schemes

Risks arising from an improperly designed, implemented and maintained food safety system can have financially crippling effects – from brand damage, decreased consumer confidence, product recalls, illness, death and legal ramifications. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in an independently verified, process-based, global food safety management standard. However, many of the early schemes and standards developed were either regionally specific or only considered food safety risks within portions of the food sector and its supply chain. In 2005, this began to change when the International Standards Organisation (ISO) published ISO 22000, the first globally recognized Food Safety Management Systems standard that would consider food safety risks and impacts across the entire food supply chain.

Naturally, this was hailed as a great step forward; however, following the publication of ISO 22000, food safety specialists from the food manufacturing sector believed that the prerequisite programs (PRPs) of ISO 22000 standard were not prescriptive enough and did not fulfill the expectations and requirements of food manufacturing stakeholders in particular.
From an assessment and certification body’s perspective, the PRPs were not auditable in a consistent manner because of the absence of important key component details on the prerequisites. This was seen as a deficiency and viewed as an impediment in the acceptance of ISO 22000 as a standard by the global food and beverage industry.

In an effort to harmonize the prerequisite programs; realize further acceptance of ISO 22000; and fulfill additional expectations and requirements of food manufacturing stakeholders, the Confederation of the Food and Drink Industries of the European Union (CIAA) sponsored the development of prerequisite programs that would take into account the specific requirements of the manufacturing stakeholders. The resulting PRPs formed the basis of a new Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 220:2008, published in October 2008 by BSI and intended to strengthen the food safety management system for food manufacturers.

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Dear Simon,

Interesting document. So the story continues ......

Dear All,

Due to the fact that the combination of ISO 22000 and the PAS 220 is very similar to our GFSI HACCP approved standard we believe it is a logical next step to facilitate this harmonized scheme for Food Processors.

Hmmm. I haven’t read the PAS 220 and I am only too willing to be corrected but I find this statement hard to believe.

Surely one of the central issues in ISO 22000 is the fundamentally modified implementation of the HACCP-related segment ?. AFAIK, this aspect is currently absent in the GFSI family scheme-of-things (?).

Does this mean that BRC et als usual acceptance of a Codex-based HACCP presentation is about to prescriptively change to the “ISO 22000 vision”.?

Personally, and purely from an operational viewpoint, I find the detail provided in the existing ISO 22000 / 7.2.3 not particularly objectionable as a guideline to put together a package of Codex type pre-requisite programs. As far as "auditability" goes, is there a rating on “adequacy of prescriptiveness” ? Or is this purely a market-driven issue.?

Perhaps I’m missing something fundamental here.

Rgds / Charles.C

Anyone else read the article - care to comment?