Food safety: 20 companies make a commitment in Occitanie

Twenty agri-food companies in Occitanie have been working for a year to review their organization in order to control health risks. At the heart of the system: the ISO 22000 standard. Find out more about their experiences on video and at two conferences in March 2020!

What do manufacturers of flour, food additives, wine, cheese and mineral water have in common? It’s all about health and safety! All companies in the agri-food sector are confronted with a multitude of criteria, imposed by legislation, private standards or customer specifications.

ISO 22000: a common denominator

To give coherence to their health-related actions, 20 companies in the Occitan region have opted for ISO 22000. This voluntary international standard on food safety management was the focus of a support program run by Coopération agricole Occitanie, AREA and financed by the DRAAF Occitanie. The challenge was to help them decipher this international standard, revised in 2018, through examples and concrete cases. Whether new to the field or already familiar with the use of other ISO standards, each company was able to question and revisit its organization to manage food safety. Over the course of a year, quality managers and executives from companies of all sizes were trained and exchanged best practices.

Deploying ISO 22000 is not an end in itself,” sums up Olivier Boutou, one of the AFNOR group’s trainers on this project. It’s an effective way of ensuring that your actions are consistent and sustainable. ISO 22000 is not prescriptive; it leaves it up to each individual to choose the means and tools to be deployed to achieve his or her objectives. That’s why it’s so adaptable to every company in the sector. “. In 2020, a new support program is due to be launched in the Occitanie region. Once again, it will combine pragmatism and theory, so that trained quality managers can deploy ISO 22000, each in their own way, in their companies. Information meetings have already been organized in Toulouse (March 12, 2020) and Montpellier (March 20, 2020).

See also our dossier on food safety.