Every single HACCP system, or food safety program, will have an element around your approved food supplier program. For all of your approved food suppliers, there is certain information that you want to gain from these suppliers in order to make sure that they are the right people and businesses to be supplying to your business. The information that you should request from your supplier includes:
Certification Certificate
Our first thing that we need is to make sure of is that you have a copy of their HACCP or third party, certification certificate. For example, this could be an SQF certificate, BRC, ISO22000. Whatever it is that the standard that you have required your suppliers to be audited to. Make sure that this certification certificate is within date.
Certification Scope
Now, one of the side of things for these certificates is to actually make sure that the company is being certified to the ingredients that they are actually supplying to you. Make sure that the scope of their certification matches what your needs and requirements are. You will need to also check the location. They may have the scope, but they may not have the location that they are saying that they are supplying out of, included in that certificate.
For example, a company may have, say, five sites located around the country. Only three of those sites are certified and they are supplying to you out of one of their other sites. So just a little bit of detective work around making sure that the scope and the location of production is included on that HACCP certificate in line with what you require.
Current Material Specifications
Our next thing is to make sure that you get current raw material specifications from your approved food supplier. This is a requirement in the majority of the GFSI standards – in that you are required to have the most up to date raw material specifications from your suppliers.
Approved Supplier Contract of Supply
Our next area is to have a ‘contract of supply’ in place with your approved supplier. If you are in a quality assurance department or food safety department, you may not be involved in the contract supply negotiations, but you need to liaise with the people within your own company procurement section who actually have something to do with that. If not, get a ‘contract of supply’ from your supplier.
Additional Licenses, approvals or registrations
Getting your approved supplier to provide you with their up to date approvals, licenses, or registrations is another option to request. These are documents that may be required by law or regulation within your particular country for those suppliers to operate as a food business.
Certificate of Analysis
The final thing that is recommended is that, depending on the risk of the product that the approved food supplier is providing to you, is to get a certificate of analysis, and/or some type of micro-testing. This may also include chemical testing if it is around, say, fruit and vegetables, sulfites, micro-testing salmonella; things like that. So these normally all come as part of a certificate of analysis.
To sum up, we have gone through five things that you want to ask of your approved supplier. Hazard certification, current raw material specifications, contracts of supply, any additional approvals, licenses, or registrations, and certificate of analysis or batch control for in-coming raw materials.
