Commitment to greater Food Safety

FSSC stands for "Food Safety System Certification" and is a certification system for food manufacturers. WeissBioTech GmbH (WBT), a BRAIN Group company, was recently certified to FSSC 22.000, thus emphasizing the quality and safety standards that the company applies to the production of its enzyme products. What exactly does the certificate entail and how much effort did certification require? Three questions to Dr. Catherine Grassin, Quality Assurance Director at WBT.

Catherine, why did WBT decide to aim for FSSC 22.000 certification?

Catherine Grassin: Over the last couple of years we have increasingly been faced with demand from key customers to provide an FSSC 22.000 certificate. This is in many cases part of our customers’ food safety management and hence a requirement that they must also meet towards their key suppliers. We knew that this would have been extremely difficult to achieve at our previous plant near Paris but with the move to Büttelborn this certification became a possibility or was indeed one of the reasons for moving the production location.
In combination with our ISO 9001 this system will help us to deliver consistently safe products of high quality to our customers worldwide. Of course, continuous improvement is inherent in all quality management systems and we see this step as part of a long journey.

On which management standard is this internationally applicable certificate based?

Catherine Grassin: This certification is based on ISO 22.000 but has a clear food focus which meets our requirements and those of our customers. The largest part of our existing and potential customer base is active in food applications and therefore FSSC 22.000 is a recognized and important certification which enables us to grow our business in the future.

What has the introduction of the FSSC management system meant for the processes at WBT?

Catherine Grassin: We had to carefully review all of our processes in light of FSSC 22.000. Most of our processes were already well documented for ISO 9001 but we needed to adapt the documentation and in some cases also the process to meet the special requirements of FSSC 22.000.

For the first time we also included some of our processes in Ascheberg, e.g. purchasing. This meant that a wider group within the company was helping to achieve the certification.

In general FSSC 22.000 helps us to get to the next level of excellence and contributes to keeping our customers and other stakeholders happy. During the process, we also benefited from the experience of our colleagues at Biocatalysts Ltd. who have been FSSC 22.000-certified for a couple of years now.