HACCP Certification Bodies - Canada Wide
I work in the wine industry and our company has many facilities from Western Canada to Eastern Canada - so we are looking for a certifying body for our HACCP programs. We currently use a company but have been told by an auditor that they do not have any food manufacturer experienced auditors for our program. So we are looking at other options. Some names that have come up are SAI, SGS, NSF and TRC - just wondering if anyone has any experience with their auditors or the companies and if they would be willing to PM or answer me on here as to the good, bad and ugly of the company. And if there are others that would be able to service our Canadian multi facilities.
Thanks so much, excited to have stumbled across this forum, have so many other questions !
MMMMMMMMM wine, my favorite reason to get up every day!
Stay as far away from NSF as you can, expensive, hard to work with, terrible customer service and I might add that I feel at least 1 auditor has questionable ethics (he should have recused himself and didn't and another poster on this site in my geographical area had same problem with same auditor), oh and NSF knows they are priced above the industry standard and didn't seem to care. Things were so bad I called their bosses in from USA to deal with my many issues.
I got really good reviews from colleagues about Dicentra based in Toronto, and the owner contacted me directly, but settled on SAI global from a sheer price point, they were $2000 apart.......that's really hard to argue to the powers taht be
I asked for references and 2 other companies flat out refused......really? I thought you were trying to sell a service here
Are you audited to a GFSI or just running a straight HACCP plan?
Right now the area I deal with is straight HACCP Plan I think its SQF based, as the originator of our program and the facilitator we hired leaned towards that. The farms would be more GFSI as they would have the Canadian GAP program, but my role is just overseeing the manufacturing area's and not the growing / farming.
I know a company that also uses NSF for their Costco audits, and similar story as yours - not good. But I wasn't sure if it was just that person or if there was a trend.
Heard from another winery that uses SGS and they don't like them, but again would like to hear from more then those single people. I will look into Dicentra, one of our facilities is in Ontario so that would definitely be a selling feature.
Thank you so much for your response!! Won't be a productive day at work for me today as I'm doing a lot of forum reading!
you will find tons of help here that's for sure! I joined 3 jobs ago and it's still my go to when I'm stuck or I'm having brain drain and need to step away
SGS, that's one that wouldn't give my name to other places so I could talk references!
If its HACCP we are with AIB, different auditors for our Quebec and Ontario facilities and both are very easy to work with.
They also have the leisure of providing counsel when auditing, SGS and others will not do that.
I recommend them.
Tamale
We use NSF.
I haven't had any bad experience with them. They always use an auditor that is about 2 hours away from us to help limit the travel costs. They are flexible on booking times. I have worked with two different auditors through NSF and had no troubles at all with them.
http://foodsafetysolutions.ca/
The consultants at Food Safety Solutions ( Western Canada) are great to work with and can help you find an auditor. They do work with NSF as well. The link for the website is above.