User:Shawndouglas/sandbox/sublevel4

Title: What standards and regulations affect a food and beverage laboratory?

Author for citation: Shawn E. Douglas

License for content: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Publication date:

Introduction

This brief topical article will examine the standards, regulations, and other factors globally influencing not only the demand for food and beverage laboratories, but also how they conduct their activities.

Globally recognized food safety standards

Implementing and maintaining conformance to internationally recognized and benchmarked food safety standards benefit the food and beverage organization in a number of ways^[1]^[2]:

It increases customer confidence through the organization's audited certification to the standard, taking the place of customers' own auditing methods to ensure quality and authenticity, in turn reducing time and costs.
It drives organizations to better monitor their activities for non-conformities, identify root causes, and develop preventative controls, while clearly reporting such efforts to customers, further reducing the need for customer audits.
It better ensures a rigorous and comprehensive approach to product safety, quality, integrity, and legality, in many cases meeting or exceeding local, state, federal, and/or international legislative requirements.
It drives organizations to better vet their suppliers and service providers for meeting required food safety management practices.
It enables organizations to better demonstrate auditable compliance with modern food safety management practices.
It allows organizations to limit product recalls, reduce customer complaints, and better protect their brand.

British Retail Consortium (BRC) Global Standard for Food Safety (GSFS)

In 1998, the British Retail Consortium (BRD) published the first edition of its Global Standard for Food Safety (GSFS), going on to becoming an internationally recognized standard of best practices in food manufacturing, storage, and distribution, and the first food safety standard to be recognized by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI). The standard covers stakeholder buy-in on continual improvement, food safety plan development, food quality management system development, manufacturing and storage site standardization, product and process control, personnel management, risk management, and trade product management.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] The standard is implemented by an organization through gap assessment, documentation development, consultation and assessment, internal auditing, and resolving non-conformances to the standard.^[2]

Codex Alimentarius

The Codex Alimentarius is a collection of internationally recognized set of food and feed standards and guidelines developed as a joint venture between the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).^[3] The Codex "is intended to guide and promote the elaboration and establishment of definitions and requirements for foods to assist in their harmonization and in doing so to facilitate international trade."^[5] Scope of the standards is broad, covering food hygiene; food additives and contaminants, including pesticides and drugs; packaging and labelling; sampling and analysis methods; and import and export inspection and certification.^[5] It's not unusual for governments to approach the FAO seek help with harmonizing national legal frameworks of food safety with the Codex Alimentarius.^[6] Among the Codex, some of the more broadly useful standards include General Principles of Food Hygiene (CXC 1-1969)^[7], General Standard for Contaminants and Toxins in Food and Feed (CXS 193-1995), and General Methods of Analysis for Contaminants (CXS 228-2001).^[8]

Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI)

The GFSI is a collection of private organizations that have developed a set of benchmarking requirements for improving food safety management programs, with a goal of making them balanced enough to be broadly applicable while remaining relevant to different countries and regions of the world.^[3] Previously known as the GFSI Guidance Document^[9], the GFSI Benchmarking Requirements act as a set of criteria and professional framework for food safety management programs to fulfill, formally allowing an organization to be recognized and certified by the GFSI. Certification to the GFSI Benchmarking Requirements "demonstrates an organization’s serious commitment to food safety to customers and potential customers across the world."^[3] An organization seeks out a third-party certification program owner (CPO) and undergoes the auditing process, which is driven and supported by the GFSI Benchmarking Requirements.^[10] GFSI is also responsible for ensuring CPOs and certification bodies meet the necessary requirements.

Hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP)

The hazard analysis and critical control points or HACCP system has been adopted and integrated in various ways over the years^[11], but at its core, the system directs organizations to focus on key areas or "critical control points" (CCPs) of vulnerability and hazard within the production process and mitigate their impact on overall food safety.^[3] Though the seeds of HACCP go back to the 1970s, it wasn't until the mid-1990s that it began finding its way into formal regulatory structures in the United States, first codified as 9 CFR Parts 304, 308, 310, 320, 327, 381, 416, and 417 in July 1996.^[11]^[12] HACCP also found its way into other standards benchmarked by the GFSI.^[11] The concept of HACCP has perhaps changed slightly over the years, but the main principles remain^[3]:

Conduct a hazard analysis.
Identify CCPs.
Establish critical limits for those CCPs.
Establish monitoring procedures for those CCPs.
Establish corrective action for failed limits.
Establish verification procedures.
Establish record keeping and documentation procedures.

International Featured Standards (IFS)

The IFS is made up of a group of eight food and non-food standards, covering various processes along the food supply chain. IFS Management, who is responsible for the standards, notes that "IFS does not specify what these processes must look like but merely provides a risk-based assessment"^[13] or "uniform evaluation system"^[3] for them. Organizations such as food manufacturers and logistics providers can certify to the standards. Some of the more relevant to food and beverage laboratories include IFS Food (for food manufacturers), IFS Global Markets Food (for food retailers), IFS PACsecure 2 (for packaging manufactures), and IFS Global Markets PACsecure (for packaging suppliers).^[14]