James Downham, CEO of Toronto-based The Packaging Association (PAC), announced a new partnership with global standards owner IFS Management GmbH of Berlin, Germany. The move is specifically engineered to bring international recognition of PAC’s PACsecure food safety standard for individual packaging materials, which results in a name change to IFS PACsecure.
“While we firmly believe that PACsecure is the world’s foremost standard for primary and secondary packaging, a large proportion of the international food industry will only accept packaging that is recognized by the Paris, France-based Global Food Safety Initiative,” said Downham. “As PAC is a not-for-profit organization, it is not in a position to go it alone in achieving GFSI recognition.”
IFS Management already provides the industry with IFS Food, benchmarked by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), and IFS Logistics standards. The group’s supply chain standards are represented by more than 12,000 certifications, globally.
IFS PACsecure will now be submitted for GFSI benchmarking and made available around the world. “More importantly for the Canadian food and packaging manufacturing sector, it means their products will be more readily accepted by both the domestic and international food industry,” said Downham.
Downham points out that more than 100 Canadian firms including packaging manufacturers, their customers and suppliers, helped develop food safety standards for each type of packaging material. In turn, each standard was based on a process known as Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) criteria, which is recognized by the United Nations and most of the food industry world wide.
The IFS PACsecure standard is said to cover 24 different manufacturing practices to produce specific packaging materials. PACsecure has also been accepted by the US-based Food Safety Alliance for Packaging. This organization includes companies such as General Mills, Nestlé, Kraft, ConAgra Foods, Sara Lee, and Campbell Soup among others.
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