Two professional food safety standards and inspection bodies, EFSIS and Organic Farmers & Growers (OF&G), have created a partnership to offer organic businesses efficient and cost-effective inspection and certification services. The organic food industry is expanding, and increased consumer demand has resulted in sales increasing, with estimated annual sector turnover to be approximately £1billion.
Working together, EFSIS and OF&G will carry out farmer and food manufacturer assessment to satisfy both their government approved standards, and the advantage is that more than one inspection can be undertaken for food producers simultaneously. The new partnership aims to better the proficiency of their services and to ensure that the best standards are applied.
“We can guarantee the food industry a truly business-like approach to organics inspection, offering excellent value-for-money,” says EFSIS marketing and international operations director, Paul Ruocco. “The combination of EFSIS and OF&G means businesses can benefit from the backing of two of the most professional organisations in the food and organic food sectors.”
According to EFSIS, it was the food crises of the 1990s - from salmonella through to BSE - that put food safety at the top of the agenda. As a consequence, a range of quality assurances schemes, which primarily reassure consumers, were put in place. Retailers, with the support of the EFSIS/British Retail Consortium (BRC) standard led the way, while at the other end of the chain, farm assurance schemes such as the current EFSIS/FABBL system have helped UK agriculture to demonstrate its generally high levels of professionalism.
“The UK has been at the forefront of quality assurance, partly due to increasing consumer concerns related to food safety issues, but also because it has a highly competitive, customer focused retail sector,” says an EFSIS spokesperson. “This sector insists on high standards as the industry knows that any failings create an instant, adverse reaction from the purchasing public. Other European countries are mirroring the UK’s success with assurance and the EurepGAP initiative in particular, which has resulted in European standards being developed and implemented across a much broader range of countries. Indeed the EurepGAP Initiative is now spreading globally. Within the UK, we must continue to maintain any advantage assurance gives us in food marketing.
“Scheme requirements have not fundamentally changed, however, any growth in awareness by producers for more and more of their production to be assured, has led to the development of more multi-skilled inspectors in order that ‘one-stop’ inspections are possible. A typical example here is the response inspection bodies such as EFSIS are now able to give to those producers who jointly have beef/lamb, cereals and fresh produce, which require assurance. The volume of food produced to assurance scheme standards continues to increase steadily. Increased focus is now being put on the whole chain approach to assurance, typically referred to as farm to plate. Transport for example, is seen as an essential assured element in the movement of farm assured livestock.”
Fundamentally the focus on food integrity is one of the most important areas within the industry, says Jonathan Berry, quality controller for Agrexco UK. “It is important to ensure that all concerns that consumers have about fresh produce are clearly met and communicated to them as they become more informed and educated in areas such as ethical trading, the environment and the use of pesticides. The UK marketplace tailors its specifications to meet customer requirements in demands and tastes which will vary to those in other European countries.”
Schemes have become more robust and all encompassing, says Berry, and they now cover a multitude of issues particularly ethical trading issues, the environment, recycling, reduction of pesticide applications, worker welfare as well as keeping abreast and ahead of customer needs and demands. “At Agrexco we are working towards meeting all the specific requirements from the individual supermarkets. The relationships between growers and our customers is very strong and growers realise the need to produce exactly what the customer wants,” he adds.
Eosta’s Nature&More scheme was created with both the requirements of the grower and the marketplace in mind. As a dedicated organic company, the company’s Hugo Skopek explains: “We like to stimulate organic needs and also social concerns such as Fairtrade, but in Nature&More we have created additional criteria as a way of taking these concerns further. Many organic consumers are open to fairly-traded products and we need to communicate our Nature&More policy to them. There are three main purchasing motivations including product quality that is a factor that obviously affects health. We undertake residue tests and also nutritional analysis of the product and we also test the end-vitality of the food. We have heard of other programmes that do small amounts of these things but I don’t believe that other schemes are as comprehensive as this - we are pioneers.” On the other side of the scale, programmes are put in place to ensure the welfare of the workers. “Happy people made good quality produce and we provide a sustainable approach.” says Skopek. “Nature&More is a product in itself and it adds value. Consumers are increasingly concerned about issues such as these, particularly in the UK, but also in Switzerland and Germany.”
Traceability is a prime focal area for assuring produce quality. In the last five years Capespan has made significant investments in assuring that every pallet at its Sheerness facility is 100 per cent traceable. “This is just one of the hoops we have gone through to make our system the best there is,” says the company’s Martin Dunnett. “Every one of the 23,000 pallets is accessible and that is a unique system that delivers many benefits. The computer system, Wizdom, which we use is part of the traceability concern - it is both a sales computer and a warehouse manager. The next plan for Wizdom is to link it up to the growers and I am convinced that as it is it gives us a distinct competitive advantage in the way we manage our fruit.”
Agrexco has invested heavily in all matters concerning training and technical issues. “People are working in sync and the support system from grower to the supermarkets is particularly strong, Clearly communicating the real progress that has and is being made in order to ensure that all products supplied to our customers meet and exceed their demands in all issues relating to the supply of fresh produce such as worker welfare and the reduction in the use of pesticides is vital,” Berry continues.
“We are working towards meeting all the specific requirements from the individual supermarkets. The relationship between growers and our customers is very strong - growers realise the need to produce exactly what the customer wants.”
“Most professional growers demonstrate that there is rarely a need to make any major or costly changes to meet the requirements of the relevant assurance scheme,” says EFSIS. “Assurance is about demonstrating that you are professional, not changing the business to conform to a set of arbitrary rules. And the cost of the inspection itself is relatively low. EFSIS has led the way in getting prices down in a highly competitive market and is determined to compete on price in the fresh produce sector and give the industry best value for money.
“EFSIS Agriculture now has up to 20,000 individual farmer customers as a consequence of its merger with Farm Assured British Beef and Lamb. It has built up its partnership with organic farmers and growers to become a major player in that sector. These activities have added to EFSIS Agriculture’s already widespread range of certification and inspection disciplines.
“EFSIS is offering more and more services outside the normal inspection and certification schemes and is well placed to respond to requirements across the whole food and agriculture sector. In particular, there are an increasing number of companies looking to outsource various current in-house technical activities and EFSIS has already taken on a number of such initiatives.
“Internationally, EFSIS has responded to initiatives in Europe and has a local presence in many European countries. This is particularly apparent in Spain where there is a significant produce market requiring servicing to local and international assurance requirements. In addition EFSIS has expanded worldwide in the last year, with moves into more European countries and a push in Asia, where demand for the BRC Standard and the EurepGAP Standard for fruit and vegetables is high.
“While we always feel that the potential exists for schemes to be modified and changed in the future, currently we believe that the industry has a clear focus on the way forward and as wide a range as assurance schemes as it needs to meet the consumer requirements of the day.
“As the demands for assurance continues to spread, the need for additional training and technical understanding grows. Growing and processing food is a highly technical operation and although the industry does have a stock of well-trained people in many areas, it continues to pay close attention to increasing the number still further.”
ASSURANCE PART OF THE FURNITURE
Stephen Cox, produce director at Cmi Certification reports on the present and future of fresh produce quality assurance.
As some of us will remember, there was a time in fresh produce growing in the UK and the rest of the world, when the size, shape and colour of the product was what each producer and importer had to supply to the UK retailer, struggling against the weather and other adversities. In today’s market place, this is now taken for granted and the market is focusing on the intrinsic quality of the product.
Why has this change happened? Virtually all fresh produce today which is supplied into the UK complies with the official quality constraints of product quality of shape etc. This is not a differential factor on the high street any more, it is how it has been produced. Recently there has been a drive by retailers to incorporate the basic areas of food safety into assurance schemes but also to define more stringent requirements to deliver their customer expectations. This drive for assurance for consumer expectations in fresh produce is also contributing to support the brand defence strategy of the retailer name in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.
In fresh produce innovation, the UK retailer is leading the European pack in terms of awareness. The structure of the business in the UK with a defined and close knit supply chain, where traceability and retailer size are consolidated issues, has given them the critical mass to download these assurance requirements to their supply base world wide and have a positive response. One important external factor in UK that has contributed to the fine-tuning of assurance by retailers on a wide range of issues, is undoubtedly the NGOs honing in on scares and concerns. In the UK it has to said, they (NGO’s) enjoy a privileged position as opposed to a less effective presence in most of mainland Europe.
Development within assurance schemes even within the last 12 months has been the incorporation of basic food safety elements on farm covering product harvesting, transport and any handling processes. This recognition of food safety is potentially the start of a long road whereby growing fresh produce is being brought into the realms of the food handling industry albeit taking into account the potentially low risk elements of many types of fresh produce.
One clear candidate for tightening up in the future will be the environmental farming elements within the assurance schemes currently in place as the EU moves to link the grant aid available to European growers to such initiatives. There are clear signals from Brussels that this will be linked to reduction of contamination of the environment by farming processes. Whilst the compliance should not necessarily be a problem for UK growers, the controls and mechanism for verifying compliance will undoubtedly have to be incorporated into the UK assurance schemes.
One of the main areas of concern today still revolves around the issues of pesticide registrations and produce harvest intervals. We live in a time where pesticides are frowned upon by politicians and hounded by NGOs but still have to form a vital part of the agricultural inputs in most crops world wide to ensure viable production. Legislation in Europe on pesticide registration will potentially push some agricultural production out of business in some European countries due to impossibility to grow specific crops without certain pesticides that are being taken off the approved EU list. While the debate often revolves around technical issues of degradation curves etc, the legal position of compliance with all legislation including that of pesticides and their usage, is vital to the retailers especially in UK where there is a greater awareness of the real situation on farm due to the transparency forged by the traceability link.
New innovations have been introduced within the last 12 months. All assurance schemes are normally reviewed every two years thus responding to new issues and channeling change down to the grower. This requirement will generate business support from consultancy and training where appropriate to the grower. The grower has had to face a battery of new demands within the last four years and only with skilled guidance will that challenge be overcome in the future as change continues to pour into the fresh produce industry.
Finally, we come to the age-old question of, can the grower pay for all these new obligations and demands through the sale of the product today and tomorrow? The current state of the UK production industry would indicate that the adjustment has already been made and additional requirements can be funneled into management structures that are more than able to handle the issues. Overseas the situation is not so buoyant where the management structures may not be so sophisticated, farm size can be small and change may be fueled by local grants and not incorporated as part of day to day operations. Having said that, today any fresh produce business that ignores farm assurance as defined within the various retailer schemes, will probably not be supplying a UK retailer.
Quality assurance when fully understood and implemented means efficient operations and lower incidental costs. Bring the two aspects together and no current or aspiring fresh produce producer in the world today, can not afford to invest in farm assurance and take it to its logical conclusion of being part of its business philosophy.”
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