Certified products bring competitive advantage

In the food safety process certifications can create market advantage for companies if they take audits seriously. Lajos Tánczos, senior auditor of ÉMI-TÜV SÜD Kft. told our magazine that a company with certified products becomes more stable from many points of view – but for this it is also necessary for the management to be committed to the whole thing and not to act as if acquiring a given certification was forced on them. The senior auditor reckons the certification market has hardly grown in the last few years. Luckily, major companies place special emphasis on quality assurance. This year there will be changes in two standards: MSZ EN ISO 9001:2009 and MSZ EN ISO 14001:2005. Both of them will focus more on company’s risk management and risk evaluation regulations. Instead of obliging them to introduce new processes, the standards will give bigger emphasis to companies’ own processes which are already being used. Another new thing is the requirements of the 2012/27/EU Energy Efficiency Directive of the European Union: this makes it mandatory for companies employing more than 250 people to have an energy efficiency audit done, in order to be able to cut their energy use by 1.5 percent a year. Regulation 1169/2011/EU on the provision of food information to consumers entered into force last December, but its mandatory nutritional value marking section won’t enter into force before December 2016, so many changes will have to be made in product packaging in the future – we were informed by Júlia Bosnyák, data quality manager of Brandbank. She also told that in the domain of online sales it is important to keep developing, so that all data on products’ packaging is available online too and displayed in compliance with the law. GS1 Hungary’s SafeBrand service provides partners with verified data made available by brand owners. PR and marketing manager Zsófia Burányi explained that they have a databank that facilitates the sharing of product data not only with consumers’ smartphones but also with online shops. There is a free SafeBrand app which can be used without having to register.