New safety scheme designed for small businesses
The Society of Food Hygiene and Technology (SOFHT) has launched a new online food safety certification scheme aimed at small local manufacturers that are put off by the time, complexity and cost of achieving certification.
Entitled SOFHTe, the electronic scheme allows suppliers to obtain certification by completing an online questionnaire. This poses a series of probing questions, which enable qualified assessors to determine the supplier’s ability to provide safe and legal food products to retail buyers.
Launching the scheme, SOFHT vice chairman Simon Houghton-Dodd, said: “It is a rigorous assessment of what you have to do.” Questionnaires are expected to take between four and six hours to complete, although this can be broken down into different sections, completed at times to suit the individual company.
Time and cost is cut by only auditing those suppliers that operate within high-risk areas or that are deemed to present a high risk within the first year of certification. All companies certified, however, will be audited - at no additional cost - within three years.
SOFHT is working in conjunction with food safety Cert-ID on the scheme. Cert-ID will provide the specialist food technology assessment and auditing capability for SOFHTe. The cost of certification under the scheme is £200 for SOFHT members and £400 for non-members. Annual renewal costs are £100 and £200 respectively. Houghton-Dodd expects to sign up between 100 and 150 companies in its first year.
SOFHTe is likely to compete with the Safe and Local Supplier Approval (Salsa) scheme, another entry level certification scheme set up in 2007 to assure retailer and foodservice buyers that small firms complied with basic food hygiene requirements. However, Houghton-Dodd disputed this: “We don’t see this as being in competition with BRC [British Retail Consortium] or Salsa [certification schemes].”
SOFHT is recruiting a network of ambassadors around Britain to help promote SOFHTe and will be holding a series of 15 regional workshops to explain how it works between January and May 2010.
