ISO consulting for Food & Beverage

Which food safety certification does a Canadian food processor need?

Start with what your customers ask for. If a retailer or brand owner requires a GFSI-recognized certificate, ISO 22000 on its own will not meet that requirement: FSSC 22000 appears on the GFSI list of recognized programs, while ISO 22000 alone does not. Because FSSC 22000 is built on ISO 22000, a system designed to ISO 22000 is a natural first step toward it.

Regulatory compliance runs alongside certification, not through it. A certificate records a certification body's view of your system. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency assesses your license and preventive control plan on its own terms.

What do food safety auditors look for in a processing plant?

Auditors follow the hazard analysis into the plant. They pick a critical control point and ask for the monitoring records, who signed them, what happened when a reading fell outside the critical limit, and who verified the corrective action. A plan not reflected in the daily records quickly becomes a major finding.

Expect questions on allergen control during changeovers, sanitation verification, approved suppliers with current certificates, and traceability one step forward and one step back. ISO 22000:2018 requires the withdrawal and recall process to be verified, so a mock recall with the time taken and the lots found is standard evidence.

Prerequisite program records carry as much weight as the plan. Pest control reports, environmental monitoring results, checks on metal detectors and thermometers, and training records for line staff are all sampled, and auditors look for trends that someone reviewed, not reports that were only filed.

Illustrative example: A bakery supplying private-label bread runs a mock recall on a flour lot. The receiving records name the lot, but the production log only records the date, so the plant cannot narrow the affected product below a full day of output. The fix is recording the ingredient lot on the batch sheet, not rewriting the recall procedure.

How do you combine ISO 22000 with ISO 9001 and ISO 14001?

ISO management system standards share a harmonized structure: the same clause numbers and titles, common terms and definitions, and identical core text. That lets one document control process, one internal audit program and one management review serve food safety, quality and the environment, while the hazard control plan and prerequisite programs stay specific to food safety.

Keep the food safety team at the center. ISO 22000:2018 expects the team to bring multidisciplinary knowledge and experience, and the same team is well placed to review changes to recipes, suppliers, equipment and packaging before they reach the line, with environmental and quality effects assessed in the same review.

A practical start is a gap analysis that sets your preventive control plan and current records against the standard you are targeting, followed by a decision on scope: which sites, product lines and storage facilities the certificate will cover. Anything left out of scope cannot appear on the certificate, so check what your customers expect to see named. For a single plant with a working preventive control plan, certification typically takes six to twelve months. The readiness check gives you a first view of where you stand.