Food Importer, Controls Required ?

Hi, this is related to the topic posted. One of our branch company does not manufacture food, but imports food products (cooking oil) , stores, and distributes them in bulk .
Our product is vegetable oil. Please advice what controls do we need to put in place for the imported food? Is a Certificate of Analysis (COA) from the food suppliers enough?
What should be in the COA? Or should we have a lab to test the food safety of the imports or both? 

 

Thanks and looking forward to your replies.

Your primary control is presumably a supplier approval process?
Specifics of the CofA scope will depend on the product and it's one with which I'm not hugely familiar, but someone else may be able to advise.
It's probably a good idea to comission some testing of your own too, partly to verify the data that your suppliers are providing, and partly to cover key food safety/regulatory parameters for your own purposes.

Any Regulatory controls required may also depend on yr/yr product's location.

We are an importer too in Canada and for us controls are prerequisites, temperature monitoring, pest control, sanitation, allergen control, supplier approval and monitoring including vendor management, tractability and mock recall and facility management.

 

For food we don't do positive release but like Charles said, based on your location there might be regulatory testings required.