Last week saw the Foundation for Food Safety Certification announce it had enhanced its FSSC 22000 scheme to include PAS 222 – the Prerequisite Program for the Manufacture of Food and Feed for Animals.
The animal food industry employs various processes to convert a wide range of raw ingredients into a multitude of products.
Such complexity, often involving global sourcing of ingredients, presents daunting challenges for ensuring safety throughout the food chain.
The application of the FSSC 22000 framework onto animal feed manufacture, said the Foundation, will help the animal feed and ingredient industries safeguard animal and human health.
And it said the extension of the scope of its scheme to cover animal feed production is now also recognized by the various accreditation bodies.
Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 222 was developed by the British Standards Institution (BSI) to specify requirements to help control animal food and feed safety hazards.
A Steering Group consisting of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and leading global food and feed companies including Cargill, Land O’Lakes, Nestlé and Nutreco was also involved in the development of the program.
"The FSSC did a great job and I’m glad to see that PAS 222 is used as a prerequisite program,” said Reinder Sijtsma, one of the leaders of the International Feed Industry Federation (IFIF) backed Feed Schemes Observatory (FSO) harmonization project.
Feed scheme benchmarking need
“However, for me, the most important criterion for making a choice in feed assurance schemes are the market needs.
This choice could be different from market to market and even from customer to customer. And that is exactly the reason why we started the FSO benchmark project,” he told this publication.
Sijtsma said that in the Netherlands, for example, there is an obligation to use a certain feed safety scheme, the GMP+, and in order to get market access all feed sector suppliers need to be certified under this scheme.
"A supplier, say, from Asia or South America will have great difficulty entering the Dutch market if they are not covered under that scheme,” said the FSO developer.
The FSO project is trying to harmonize feed safety schemes, said Sijtsma, in a bid to ensure there is freedom of movement for feed materials all over the globe.
He said a lack of mutual recognition arrangements among the feed safety schemes and the industry could hinder such trade.
The project is also aiming to have a benchmarking tool available for industry by July this year to enable users to explore and compare safety schemes and self-assess their business against standard requirements.
This benchmarking program, added Sijtsma, may show gaps in a feed safety scheme such that it is weak, for example, in communication to customers or to authorities.
Fraudulent practices
He said that a lack of coordination also among schemes can leave the animal feed sector vulnerable to parties intent on fraudulent practices such as adulteration or substitution.
One contamination incident can be enough to damage a whole industry – a truth the animal feed sector knows only too well with incidents in the past few years ranging from dioxin contamination of bread meal in Ireland, feed fats in Germany, and aflatoxin-tainted corn from Serbia found in compound feed in Germany.
“Furthermore, many feed schemes are working to traditional feed management procedures and norms but, perhaps, these are not vigorous enough when it comes to dealing with fraud,” said Sijtsma.
For this reason, he added, it is vital to seek the creation of a global, independent and impartial platform of cooperation, between the feed safety schemes, the conformity assessment bodies, the industry and the regulators.
Teaming up with the food sector is also high on the FSO team’s list of priorities in order to tighten up the links between feed and food safety schemes but “the internal review of feed schemes is needed first. By 2015, we should be ready to engage with the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI)," he added.