Some Early Adopters of ISO 22000:2005

Early adopters underline benefits of new ISO standard for safe food supply chains

Companies among the first in the world to implement ISO 22000 are underlining the benefits of the new International Standard for ensuring safe food supply chains. Early adopters have provided favourable comments and expressed positive reactions to the standard in response to an informal enquiry from ISO Central Secretariat to gauge the worldwide reaction to ISO 22000, which ISO published on 1 September 2005. At least 29 countries around the world are already reporting various ISO 22000 deployment activities.

At the link below you will find an edited selection of comments from companies that have already been certified to ISO 22000, and secondly a brief overview of worldwide developments in relation to ISO 22000.

Full ISO press release

Note: These certifications of course will be unaccredited at the moment as UKAS (and other accreditation bodies) are not completing the accreditation process till early in the new year.

Regards,
Simon

Simon,

Thank you for raising this pertinent issue as it is pretty apparent that some horrible "professional organizations" out there are purely taking advantage of market ignorance. Competencies of FSMS Auditors......some thing that I have been harping about for a while is a huge issue particularly so as I realise the quality of some auditor conversion courses are pathetically not up to speed.

Unless companies are involved in the UKAS Pilot Certification Scheme, the article speaks for those who are not. Caution is essential.

When I read the ISO press release on the "early adopters" of ISO 22000 and saw the following warning on the ANAB website:

Note: ISO/CASCO Joint Working Group (JWG) 11 met in Copenhagen Denmark in December 2005 to resolve comments from ISO Technical Committee 34 on the proposed ISO/TS 22003. The JWG expressed strong concern that some ABs and CBs were already offering accredited or unaccredited certificates for ISO/IEC 22000 certification. Most members of JWG 11 anticipate that because of the very high level of audit-team competencies outlined in the current draft of ISO/TS 22003, all or a majority of audits will have to be redone at the expense of the certified organizations. JWG members asked CASCO, through its liaison with the International Accreditation Forum (IAF), to express this concern to IAF and have IAF inform its AB members and CB association members and ask that no more certification audits (accredited or unaccredited) occur until ISO/TS 22003 has a more definitive structure and wording.

I contacted ISO and asked if they were not concerned about, involuntarily, feeding the irrational race towards unaccredited/questionable certificates. Their response was that they press release was not meant to do so and, actually, the note in ANAB's website might not correspond with other TC34 participant's recollection of the meeting conclusions.