SQF doesn't have much to do with organic certification. Non-GMO certification is another animal as well and NOT the same as organic. Depending on how fast you can put together your SOP's, gather the required documentation from vendors and suppliers, put the labels together will determine how quickly you can be organic certified. Keep in mind people need to be trained as well and you need to have all verification records in place as well. Organic audits do require a mass balance and a traceability to show you are not packaging non-organic into organic. If you are just starting certifiers may find this difficult since you have no records or little records for organic. I've had this issue in my past and what the auditor has done is a mass balance and traceability on a conventional product and ingredient. It worked fine.
If your company is looking to produce organic products then just stick with organic certification. If your customers want non-GMO certification on top of organic that can be done as well and usually in the same audit by the same certification company.
QAI is one of the largest organic certification companies. Yes, they want some paper trail, but also how can you provide a paper trail if you can't produce the product without certification? They understand this as well...so, what do you do? Call them up and discuss. Or, whichever certification body you choose. There are a number of them out there. I've dealt with 3 different ones, QAI, CCOF, and Oregon Tilth. QAI is my choice because of the resources they have and the speed in responding to any questions, issues, or changes you may have to make with your organic program or product listings.
FYI...you DO NOT have to switch to an organic compliant sanitizer if you don't wish to. You can do a water flush on the equipment and/or product purge to provide the separation. An organic approved sanitizer is nice, but not always the best option depending on how often you run organic in your facility and cost. Also, be mindful of your water and steam as to what chemicals you may be using to treat water and/or steam (boiler water), including cooling towers and glycol chill water if you have it. If any of those things potentially come into contact with product or product contact surfaces (steam for cleaning, water, steam for heating product) then the chemicals used in those mediums must be organic approved. But, as with the sanitizer you can also turn off the chemicals and purge the system to meet compliance. You just have to have a specific procedure for this and verify it. At my former plant we used direct steam injection and would turn off the chemical feed for the boilers the day before we ran organic products. We would test the boiler water before running organic to make sure there were no chemicals.
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