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Quick links about CHC OFFS:
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Find out more about the Canadian Horticultural Council (CHC) On-Farm Food Safety Program (OFFS):
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Group Certification
Producers can be certified to the CHC OFFS Program by organizing themselves as a Group and running a central food safety management system. This approach was developed based on GlobalGAP's group certification scheme.
Essentially, Group Certification offers a two-layered approach to auditing, involving:
- farm audits by the Group of its members' sites, and
- external or third party audit of the Group itself by the CHC-designated certification body, QMI-SAI Global.
For the first layer (1) of audits, the Group must carry out annual producer audits of each registered producer and production location. No sampling is permitted. These inspections must cover the full CHC Audit Checklist. New members must pass the audit prior to being entered on the registered list. In addition, each central “produce handling site”, whether a storage or packing facility, must be second-party audited annually. The audit reports, corrective actions, etc. must be impartially reviewed. In effect, the Group is charged with acting as if it were a certification body operating with initial certification and annual surveillance audits of its members' operations.
For the second layer (2), external audits of the Group itself, sampling is permitted to certify the Group. The specifics as to who is audited and at what frequency, including random sampling plans, are outlined in the chart under Option B in
CHC's Web site. Costs, some actual and some estimated, are also indicated in the chart. The third party audit functions would be carried out by the CHC certification body, QMI-SAI Global.
In addition to the overview of requirements in the chart mentioned above, the following requirements would need to be met by the Group. These are consistent with GlobalGAP:
- The producer group must be a legal entity with the legal right to carry out agricultural production and/or trading, and be able to legally contract with and represent the group members (e.g., a cooperative, a producers association, a packing, trading or farming company). Several types of legal organization are excluded, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), consulting companies and development agencies.
- The group must have ultimate responsibility over the production, handling and ownership of the products; thus it is responsible for the compliance with the CHC requirements and the agreement signed as CHC program enrollee. However, each registered member must be legally responsible for their respective production locations.
- The entire crop of a registered product from all locations included in the group must be certified.
- The group must have in place a quality management system (QMS) that covers all aspects of the group and is sufficiently robust to ensure (and to demonstrate through audits) that the group's registered producer members/ production locations comply in a uniform manner with the CHC requirements. The basic elements of the QMS are those that would be included in a system that would comply with ISO 9001 or as a basic version of a certification body (i.e., management responsibility, document control, training, a registry of farms, procedures for dealing with complaints, appeals, internal audits, farm inspections, suspensions and withdrawal of registrations of farms, etc).
In addition to the overall food safety management system (QMS), the producer group must meet several organizational requirements. These include having:
- a management representative, either a person or a department responsible for managing the implementation of the CHC requirements in the group;
- one or more internal inspector(s) who are responsible for the internal inspections of each producer member of the group annually;
- internal auditor(s) who are responsible for the internal audit of the QMS;
- a technical person or department responsible for providing technical advice to the group; and,
- a QMS person or department responsible for managing the QMS.
The above are functions, not necessarily individuals. The CHC Program will identify specific requirements for the qualifications and competencies of persons undertaking farm inspections and internal audits. Please contact the CHC National Office for more information.
For an overview of the cost of Option B, visit CHC's Web site.
Back to main page of CHC On-Farm Food Safety Program
