BRC certificate
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) was founded when, in the 1990s, a number of supermarket chains (retailers) in England agreed on a quality policy.
The BRC drew up a standard (the BRC standard for food) and required all suppliers (food producers) to comply with this standard.
First and foremost it was a real inspection standard with many production and environmental requirements. The latest version also has requirements for a quality management system and food safety (including an HACCP plan and a management review).
HACCP (Hazard analysis of critical control points) is a management system for food safety.
The 7 central points of a good HACCP system are:- Specify all potential dangers.
- Establish the critical CCP management issues (these are the issues where a process’s risks are limited).
- State the critical limits per CCP.
- Establish how these CCP’s are monitored.
- Set down per CCP which corrective measures are needed for safety to be re-established.
- Check whether the HACCP approach is working well: verification.
- Set down on paper what has been adjusted and how that happened.
A quality management system allows us to continually check the whole procedure and therefore also update and adjust it. We then do an evaluation for the year in the form of a review: the management review.
As well as the food production standards, BRC has also introduced a standard for food packaging materials. That is the BRC-IOP.
If you fully meet this standard, you are awarded an A certificate.
Given that Cavalier has consistently focused on quality and health ever since it was founded, the company has received an A certificate as of its first audit in 2006.
