Retail and wholesale
The retail and wholesale sector is a complex and vulnerable part of the food supply chain. Any upstream failure can result in unsafe products and high-impact incidents, which can cause consumer trust to be lost and brand reputation to be significantly damaged.
Aside from selling food products, in-store activities like cutting or portioning meat, fish, or cheese add to the complexity of retail and wholesale processes. Many large retail and wholesale organizations have stores that are involved or operating in different countries. Food safety needs to be assured by both centralized and decentralized processes, and effective communication and control processes are critical to ensure food safety.
FSSC 22000 provides a certification Scheme that ensures a robust Food Safety Management System (FSMS) for controlling food safety hazards, minimizing risks, and assisting in ensuring the production and sale of safe food. Reliably providing safe food contributes to consumer trust and, eventually, consumer loyalty.
“In our experience, certified organizations are one step ahead in implementing a sustainable quality management system. Organizations that work according to a food safety system experience fewer non-conformities.”Sally Elsherif, QA Operations Director - Metro AG
FSSC 22000 uses international standards: ISO 22000 for FSMS and the publicly available specification (PAS) 221, the requirements for prerequisite programs for retail and wholesale. The FSSC 22000 Additional Requirements for certification ensure consistent, high-quality audits, which are monitored by an integrity program to measure and maintain audit performance worldwide.
Alongside the ISO 22000 framework, FSSC 22000 also allows the integration of your FSMS with other risk-based management systems. These might include ISO 9001 Quality Management, ISO 14001 Environmental Management, ISO 45001 Occupational Health and Safety Management, and ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management.
Scope
FSSC 22000 can be applied to all retail and wholesale organizations that sell food, including:
- Supermarkets and hypermarkets
- Wholesale (cash and carry) stores
- Convenience stores
- Mass or club stores