ISO 22000 Food Safety Management System

During last decades the stream of food scandals has caused that the hygiene and food safety have become the main subject of the consumers interests all around the world. Concerning the fact that these threats do not have the borders, public pressure for the all-European implementation of measures has grown with the main objective to increase the food safety. EU reacted by the elaboration of number of legal regulations within the food safety area. These regulations had to be implemented by producers to their management systems within the short time. This caused the pressure towards the producers, processors and food distributors to prove, within the competitive struggle, expressly, transparently and credibly their ability to fulfill the legal requirements in the practice and within the area of safety and hygiene within all food web.

The base management tool for above mentioned requirements fulfillment and obtaining of customer’ s trust is the implementation of food safety management system (FSMS) according to international standard ISO 22000.

This international standard specifies the requirements for structural system of food safety management, which connects generally established key items of food safety assurance because it integrates the rules of system of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) and the steps of its application, elaborated by the Codex Aliment Arius Committee, with the system of preventive requirements programs (PRP).

This international standard mainly makes provisions for standard ISO 9001 provisions with the aim to increase compatibility of these two standards and enables simple implementation mainly in such food industry organizations, where the system of quality management according to ISO 9001 has already been established. Standard ISO 22000 can be successfully applied also individually, independently of other standards and management systems aside from the size of organization or operation.

To help these organizations during implementation and applying of this standard the manual for usage of the standard is specified in ISO/TS 22004.

Implementation and certification of food safety management system according to standard ISO 22000 brings to organization advantages in many areas

Internal advantages for organization

• Improvement of hygiene, technological discipline
• Improvement of management and personnel communication
• Review of tasks and explicit specification of individual employees responsibilities, improvement of work discipline
• More effective checking of processes, employees, suppliers, raw materials and final products
• Decrease of defectiveness, improvement of qualitative indexes
• Operative problems solving, possibility of permanent improvement
• Compatibility with the system of quality management according to standard ISO 9001 and other management systems – possibility of integrated management system generation

External advantages for organization

• Resumption of consumers trust within the food safety
• Improvement of company’s image in the eye of consumer and inspection bodies
• Improvement of legal protection of organization
• Decrease of the pressure from inspection bodies following the increased qualitative and safety standard
• Easier implementation and carriage of new products on the market
• Easier and more effective creation and maintenance of marketing position of the organization within given sector

Standard ISO 22000 provides the manual for building up and maintenance of effectively working food safety management system. A certified organization is qualified to use a certification mark for certified scopes.