Clariant, a focused and innovative specialty chemical company, today announced it has completed ISO 22000 certification for its sites at Sant Andreu de la Barca (Barcelona), Spain, and Tangerang, Indonesia, recently. Together with the Indonesian site and the former certified site in Singapore, Sant Andreu de la Barca is the third global site, and the first in Europe, to have completed the certification.
Certification strengthens Clariant’s global capabilities and leadership position as a supplier of high-quality, high-performance color and additive masterbatches for the food industry. Applications supported by the Spanish site include plastics caps and closures, food tabs and bottles, as well as film and sheet. In recent years, regulators have determined that packaging that comes in direct contact with food products must be considered a food ingredient and must meet the same standards for safety. Since Clariant’s color and additive concentrates are used in making plastics packaging, achieving ISO 22000 status for its manufacturing plants simplies the certification process for its customers and their clients.
“Our objective was to build on Clariant’s long-standing collaboration with current customers and expand the business related to food contact applications,” says Alessandro Dulli, Global Head of Segment and BD Packaging. “We now can readily support food producers who are already using a similar standard, or plastics converters who want to make sure that the entire value chain applies comparable procedures to the ones they are using in their production lines.”
ISO 22000 is a family of international standards that addresses food-safety management and lists measures that an organization needs to put in place to control eventual food safety hazards. These regulations are more stringent than earlier standards governing simple food contact. The need for such a standard is driven by an increased level of awareness of consumers towards food safety.
The certification process, which was overseen by SQS, a qualified Swiss provider of international certifications and audit systems,took roughly one full year and will undergo constant annual review. It represents a further step over HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) qualification that San Andreu achieved a few years ago.