Within the last few years requirements of the food industry have changed. According to new food legal regulations, norms, standards and initiatives enterprises are confronted with a number of new challenges. Due to these new developments, enterprises have to act in a more self-governing way along the production chain in order to ensure food safety and quality

With the new EU food law a European-wide uniform legal framework has been created for the food production. It provides guidelines for food safety and quality but it gives those in charge for food production the leeway to put their own control systems into action. To realize this chance and to assure improvement in the production and business operations it is necessary to provide enterprises with organizational and technical support.

How the implementation of own controlling systems works, in particular in the enterprises, can be discussed in this weblog. Input for initiating the discussions is offered in form of a presentation made in cooperation with the Wageningen University (Netherlands), University of Bonn (Germany) and GIQS (German abbreviation for “Trans Border Integrated Quality Assurance”). The presentation offers a short summary of the quality relevant Europe-wide legal requirements, standards, norms and initiatives for the food production.

[start the presentation]

After this brief introduction we would like to start a discussion about the situation in your company related to pork quality management. For that we raise some questions as an input for our discussion.

• Do you have any problems with regards to mutual recognition of quality management EU standards / certificates (related to your supplier or costumer)?
• Which situations require you to have certificates?
• To what extent are quality management certificates an entry for new markets?
• Do you claim certificates from your supplier? What are your reasons for claiming them?
• To what extent do different processing regulations in countries hinder the food production/processing on the spot?
• Do you also suffer from “audit tourism”? What steps do you advice to take against it?
• How do you train your employees in regard to the hygiene package? And do you require support from third parties in view of training? What kind of support from third parties is needed?
• Which aspects/elements of the quality management system were most difficult to implement?
• Which more specific aspects related to the EU regulations were added in your country?

Please let us know if the experts should address any of the points mentioned above more in-depth.