Food safety management systems are the backbone that holds together the internationally recognised quality standards for all stages of the food industry.
While hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) has become ubiquitous in the food industry and ISO 9001 in industry generally, few understand that it is the ISO 22000 family of standards that ties it all together to ensure the safety of the food that we eat.
ISO 22000-2018 standards are the framework of auditable standards for food safety management systems (FSMS) that in the first instance combine the recognised HACCP principals with elements of ISO 9001.
A key component of ISO 22000 standards is prerequisite programmes (PRPs). These are the basic conditions and activities that are necessary within individual organisations and throughout the food chain to maintain food safety. The ISO 22000 family of standards has a series of technical specifications dedicated to maintaining prerequisite programmes to assist in controlling food safety hazards in the manufacturing, production, storage and transport processes as follows:
ISO 22001 Guidance for the application of ISO 9001 in the food and drink industry
ISO 22002 Prerequisite programmes on
food safety: technical standards (TS)
- ISO TS-1. Food manufacturing
- ISO TS-2. Catering
- ISO TS-3. Farming
- ISO TS-4. Food packaging manufacturing
- ISO TS-5. Transport and storage
ISO 22003 Food safety management systems: requirements for bodies providing audit certification of food safety management systems.
ISO 22004 Food Packaging Manufacturing
ISO 22005 Traceability in the feed and food chain: general principles and basic requirements for system design and implementation.
ISO 22006 Quality management systems: guidelines for the application of ISO 9001:2008 to crop production
(ISO 22006 may not be strictly relevant to the foodservice industry)
ISO 22007 Guidance on traceability and transparency in the food chain
While all the standards – and their PRP technical standards – are interconnected, it is ISO 22002 TS-5 and 22007 – when applied to the catering industry – that is seldom considered and is even ignored in the gaining of HACCP accreditation.
In the foodservice industry HACCP responsibility generally starts at the loading dock and finishes on the customers plate. Although these days, with the advent of Deliveroo and ghost kitchens it seems the responsibility from the caterers’ food safety perspective now ends at the kitchen door.
In fact ISO 22007 requires management of the complete supply chain and therefore applies to all meal systems, including where food is distributed away from the premises where it is produced right to the customers plate: actually from farm to plate.
This means that when requiring a supplier be HACCP compliant it is not sufficient to ask for and accept their HACCP compliance accreditation document to ensure that the food or ingredients or even the service that you are receiving ensures your food is safe. It is the ISO 22000 certification that confirms the steps the supplier is taking that validates their ability to control food safety hazards and ensure that the food being supplied is fit for human consumption when it arrives on the plate.
Blockchain delivers
It is this requirement for full traceability and transparency in the food supply chain that can be effectively and transparently managed through blockchain technology. The connection between a fully operational, farm-to-fork ISO 22000 compliant HACCP system and a blockchain distributed ledger is closer than you might think. In most HACCP systems each link (or node) in the chain will operate independently and pass on their accreditation to the next link in the chain; that will accept it as a given. The system in this case works blindly on trust that each node is doing the right thing because they have provided their HACCP certification.
There is no transparency as to how they are maintaining their compliance or if there could be individual operating conditions or changes that might not of themselves have an impact on their HACCP compliance, but might for a peculiar reason have an impact on the receiving parties’ operation and compliance risk. In some cases, the impact may even be further down the supply chain than the next node.
In simple terms a blockchain is structured data that is used to represent a record of every significant transaction, event or operation in the chain.
- Information is digitally encrypted and recorded to ensure authenticity as it cannot be tampered with.
- The records become a digital ledger, which is distributed among the known approved parties (nodes) so that all data is able to be seen by all parties in real time.
- The blockchain is designed to identify parties to the chain and exclude anyone not part of the chain.
In implementing an ISO 22000 blockchain each link in the supply chain becomes a node and all the critical data provided by each node, as part of their compliance, is contained in the ledger, which is open to all participants.
Each participant is able to evaluate the impact of ledger data, data change or addition at any time, on their own HACCP compliance. This can be achieved through each node executing an algorithm that will identify the impact on their operating systems and compliance of all preceding node inputs and flag any non-compliance, risks or potential hazards that can be then managed by all parties to the supply chain.
For example, a kitchen receiving processed vegetables may pick up that a process change by their supplier means there is no secondary filtering after washing to ensure there are no bugs, potentially contaminating the produce prior to packaging. They can then ensure their own risks are managed and add the change into the blockchain ledger for the following nodes to be aware of.
In this way the requirements of ISO 22007; guidance on traceability and transparency in the food chain, can not only be maintained but also FSMS requirements of each company in the supply chain can be ensured.
ISO 22000 requires transparency in the food chain; blockchain technology can deliver it securely.
Tim Smallwood FFCSI is the principal of Foodservice Design Management in Victoria, Australia
