ISO 22000 appears on a great many supplier profiles, and it is often read as a general badge of seriousness. It is more specific than that, and understanding what it actually certifies makes it a far more useful tool for evaluating a supplier — and shows you where it stops.
What ISO 22000 certifies
ISO 22000 is a food safety management system standard. It certifies that an organisation has built, documented and operates a system for managing food safety hazards, and that an external auditor has verified that system against the standard's requirements.
The core of it is the HACCP discipline — identify the hazards, work out where in the process they can be controlled, set limits at those points, monitor them, and act when monitoring shows a limit has been breached — wrapped in the management-system architecture common to ISO standards: defined responsibilities, document control, traceability, internal audit, corrective action and management review.
What it does not certify is equally important:
- It is not a product certification. It does not state that a given lot meets a given specification.
- It is not an organic, Halal or Kosher certification. Those are separate schemes with separate audits.
- It does not, by itself, prove compliance with a specific import market's regulations.
The correct reading of an ISO 22000 certificate is: this facility runs a systematic, audited approach to food safety. The correct reading of a certificate of analysis is: this lot tested as follows. A buyer needs both, and they answer different questions.
Where the hazards sit in herb and spice processing
Dried botanicals present a characteristic hazard profile, and a credible food safety plan will address each:
- Microbiological. Dried herbs are grown in soil and dried in air; the raw material carries a natural microbial load. Because they are frequently added to foods that receive no further heat treatment, control of this load — and validated treatment where the specification requires it — is the central issue.
- Foreign matter. Stones, soil, metal, glass, plastic and plant material other than the target species. Controlled by the cleaning sequence, magnetic separation and, where specified, optical sorting and metal detection.
- Chemical. Pesticide residues, and the possibility of contamination during storage or transport.
- Mycotoxins. The consequence of moisture and temperature conditions permitting mould growth in the field, during drying, or in storage.
- Allergen and species integrity. Cross-contact between products sharing a line, and adulteration or substitution — a well-documented risk in ground spices in particular.
What a certificate actually tells you, and how to check it
Certificates are easy to display and not always easy to interpret. Before relying on one:
- Check the scope. The certificate names the activities and sites it covers. A certificate covering one facility says nothing about material processed elsewhere.
- Check the validity dates and whether surveillance audits are current.
- Check the certification body and its accreditation.
- Check that the legal entity named matches the party you are contracting with.
Any exporter should be willing to provide the certificate for verification. We issue ours, with the rest of the set, through our export documents process.
ISO 22000, FSSC 22000, HACCP and BRCGS
Buyers frequently ask which standard they should require. In outline:
- HACCP is the hazard-analysis methodology itself — the foundation the others build on.
- ISO 22000 adds the management-system framework around HACCP.
- FSSC 22000 is ISO 22000 plus sector-specific prerequisite programmes and additional requirements, and is recognised by the Global Food Safety Initiative.
- BRCGS is a separate GFSI-recognised scheme, more prescriptive in style, and often specified by retailers.
If your own customer requires GFSI recognition, ISO 22000 alone will not satisfy that requirement — you need a GFSI-recognised scheme. It is worth establishing this early, because it determines which suppliers can serve the account at all.
How to use this in supplier evaluation
A certificate is the beginning of due diligence, not the end. The questions that reveal whether a system is real:
- What are your critical control points for this product, and what are the limits?
- How is a deviation recorded, and what happened at the last one?
- How far back can you trace a shipped lot, and how quickly?
- Have you run a mock recall, and what did it show?
- Which tests are routine per lot, and which are performed on request?
Suppliers running a genuine system answer these readily, because the answers sit in records they maintain anyway.
HS Herbs operates to ISO 9001, ISO 22000 and HACCP certification and is an FDA-registered facility; Halal documentation is available on request. Certificates are provided for verification with a confirmed enquiry. Related reading: quality testing methods for imported herbs and spices and organic certification for Egyptian herbs.