ISO 22000 Food Safety Management System Consultancy

The Requirements of ISO 22000 Certification:

The High-level Structure of ISO 22000 consists of 10 clauses that revolve around the principle of Plan-Do-Check-Act. This Annex SL document consists of 10 sections, out of which the first three are introductory in nature while the rest seven are auditable and give the requirements for the implementation of ISO 22000 for FSMS. The structure contains some compulsory requirements for effective implementation of the Food Safety Management System (FSMS) in an organization.

Let’s understand the last seven sections for ISO 22000 standard in detail:

• SECTION 4: Context of the organization This section deals with the scope of FSMS in your food supply industry and understanding the needs of the consumers. It reviews all those factors that might affect your food product industry. They may be external or internal and can affect the interested parties such as consumers, clients, contractors, stakeholders, etc.
• SECTION 5: Leadership This section highlights the role of top management in the implementation of FSMS. It provides a method of assigning roles transparently to the staff and ensuring smooth communication throughout.
• SECTION 6: Planning This includes planning the objectives for your current management system and analyses the risks involved, in order to eliminate those risks. It also involves timely analyzing the food supply processes for a better management system.
• SECTION 7: Support In this section, the organization is made aware of the tools, technologies, and resources that are required for the implementation of FSMS. This section demonstrates the requirements as per the standard around competence, awareness, maintenance, and controlling documented data.
• SECTION 8: Operation This section deals with operational requirements for the proper food safety management system. It involves determining the requirements for food safety products and services as well as providing an assessment of the existing procedures and compliance to the legal obligations. The key requirement is to perform risk assessments regularly.
• SECTION 9: Performance evaluation This section involves monitoring and measurement of the progress of FSMS in terms of food safety products and services. The performance of your FSMS can be regularly assessed through monitoring and measurement techniques. This ensures the ability of your food safety management system in meeting the objectives demonstrated by your organization.
• SECTION 10: Improvement This section ensures that your food safety management system is effective. It ensures that your organization is able to meet the changing market demands by continually improving the management system.

How does MSCi help your organization to achieve ISO 22000 Certification?

MSCi (Management System Compliance Incorporation) is one of the leading consultation bodies that help your organization to achieve ISO 22000 certification for food safety management system by using all the right processes. MSCi provides detailed information about the procedure for achieving ISO 22000 for your food safety management system. It provides guidance to your food product industry for getting ISO 22000 certified management system without any hassle.

MSCi helps the applicant to be well aware of the importance of ISO 22000 in their food safety organization. It helps them to remain competitive in the food chain businesses, including all the efficient and effective processes for improvement in the production and distribution. MSCi aims at delivering effective, practical, and result-oriented solutions for your food safety management system.

The documents ISO 22000 asks you to have

A standard does not ask for a library. It asks for evidence that you decide things deliberately and can show how. This is what an auditor will look for on a ISO 22000 system — specific to the standard first, then the records every management system needs.

• Food safety policy and food safety team, with the team leader named
• Product descriptions and intended use, including allergen information
• Process flow diagrams verified on site
• Hazard analysis, with critical control points and their limits justified
• HACCP plan and operational prerequisite programmes
• Prerequisite programme records — cleaning, pest control, personal hygiene, water quality
• Monitoring records at every critical control point, and the corrections taken
• Traceability records able to reach one step forward and one step back
• Product withdrawal and recall procedure, with test results
• Roles, responsibilities and authorities, written down and known to the people holding them
• Competence and training records for anyone whose work affects the system
• Internal audit programme, audit reports and the findings raised
• Management review minutes, showing what was decided rather than that a meeting happened
• Nonconformity and corrective action records, with root cause and effectiveness checked
• Document and record control — what is current, who approved it, how long it is kept

Length is not compliance. A procedure nobody follows is worse than no procedure, because an auditor will find the gap between the two. Our test is whether the person who has to do the job recognises their own work in it.

How to start

Beginning well is mostly a matter of sequence. Almost everything that goes wrong in a ISO 22000 project can be traced to documentation written before anybody established what the organisation already does.

• Establish what is being asked, and by whom. A customer, a tender, a regulator and a parent company each want something slightly different, and the answer decides the scope.
• Fix the scope in writing — which sites, which activities, which products. Scope drives cost more than any other single decision, and a scope widened after the audit is booked is re-work.
• Have a gap assessment done against ISO 22000, on evidence rather than on a questionnaire. You can score yourself first with the free readiness checklist on this site; the expert assessment is what turns that score into a plan.
• Appoint somebody internally who owns it. Not necessarily full time, but named, and senior enough to get decisions made.
• Document only what the gap assessment showed is missing, in the words the people doing the work already use.
• Train, then run the system long enough to generate real records. Three months of genuine records cannot be produced in a fortnight, and this is the step organisations try hardest to skip.
• Audit yourself, hold a management review that actually decides something, then book the certification audit.

How to choose a certification body

Choosing the body is the one decision in a ISO 22000 project that you cannot delegate to us, and the one where the cheapest answer is most often the wrong one.

Four things decide it. Accreditation: the body should be accredited for your standard and your industry by a recognised accreditation body, and the certificate should carry that mark. Sector competence: an auditor who has audited your industry asks better questions and wastes less of your time. Recognition: ask the customer or tender that triggered this whether they name particular bodies. Cost and diary: audit days are set by your headcount and scope, so quotes should be comparable — and if one is far cheaper, look at the audit days before the price.

Among the bodies most widely recognised, in no particular order: BSI, TÜV, SGS, SIS Certifications, Intertek, DNV, BVQI.

MSCi works with a pool of accredited certification bodies rather than one. That is a commercial advantage to you, and worth being plain about why: bodies differ in audit-day rates, in travel cost to your location, in how quickly they can get an auditor to you, and in which sectors they are accredited for. Having several to approach means we can put your scope in front of the ones that fit it and bring you back comparable quotes, instead of you taking the first number offered.

What it does not change is the audit. We cannot influence a finding and would not try — the body's independence is the entire value of the certificate, and any consultancy offering otherwise is selling you something worthless. We prepare you so that the audit is uneventful, and the body decides.

Note also that whoever builds your management system must not be the body that certifies it. Accreditation rules prohibit it, which is why we prepare and never certify.

What ISO 22000 is usually taken with

Few organisations stop at one standard, and the second costs far less than the first — the clauses that take longest are the ones they share. Where ISO 22000 sits next to something else, this is what carries over.

• HACCP consultancy — is the hazard analysis at the centre of this standard; the plan is the same document.
• FSSC 22000 consultancy — is ISO 22000 plus the additional requirements retailers ask for, so the gap is smaller than it looks.
• BRC consultancy — is what many UK and European retailers name instead; the prerequisite programmes overlap heavily.
• ISO 9001 consultancy — shares clauses 4 to 10 with this standard, so context, leadership, competence, internal audit and management review are built once and audited together.

Certified to more than one, you hold a single management system with one set of objectives, one internal audit programme and one management review — audited in one visit. Run as separate systems they cost roughly twice as much to keep, which is the usual reason a second certificate feels harder than it was.