Taking control over the logistic related steps in the supply chain demonstrates your company’s capability to meet customers’ and consumer’s requirements with food and beverage quality, safety and legality issues.

Purpose

Based on their “due diligence” concept (the capability to be able to demonstrate that every reasonable measure has been taken to avoid an incident), the European retailers have established specific standards to ensure food (and non-food) product quality, safety and legality for the logistic related steps in the food and beverage supply chain.

A breakdown of a vehicle transporting iron coils or laptops has different implications compared with an incident for a vehicle transporting raw milk or mozzarella cheese. Surveillance measures for refrigerators or for beverages in plastic bottles can have very different security implications in relation to non food and beverage products.

These unique aspects of the food and beverage product logistics are addressed in standards intended to fulfil the retailer’s “due diligence” concept and applies to any player in the food and beverage supply chain. These aspects are also included in the more general Good Hygienic Practice (GHP), Good Distribution Practice (GDP) and Good Trading Practice (GTP).

Benefits

The implementation of sufficient control measures based on a quality management system is crucial to demonstrate your company’s capability to meet customers’ and consumer’s requirements related to food quality, safety and legality issues.

The BRC (British Retail Consortium) Global Standards Storage and Distribution and the IFS Logistic Standard are safety system standards, applicable to food and non food products. They are created to ensure supplier compliance taking in consideration the warehousing, transportation and distribution steps, to secure the retailers’ ability to guarantee the quality and safety of the food products that they sell.