Code of Practice for Organic Food Processing. With contributions from Ursula Kretzschmar, Angelika Ploeger and Otto Schmid.

Summary

The consumers of “low input” and organic foods have specific expectations with respect to quality parameters of processed food. These may relate to the degree of processing, concern about specific additives, nutritional composition, integrity or whole food concepts, the degree of convenience, the level of energy use and transportation distances, but also to food safety.
For many processors, fulfilling all of these expectations represents a tremendous challenge in understanding and implementing the standards requirements in daily practise. Therefore, it is necessary to have in this field a guidance document for processors as well as standard setting institutions and certification/inspection bodies.
In the EU project on “Quality of low input food” (QLIF, No. 50635), which deals with food safety and quality issues related to food from low-input and organic food systems, it was possible to elaborate a specific code of practise for food processing as part of the Subproject 5 on processing.
The starting point for this publication was a literature survey about underlying principles of organic and low-input food processing (Schmid, Beck, Kretzschmar, 2004) and a broad European-wide consultation in 2 rounds, which was also undertaken in the QLIF-project. The results of these studies showed that many companies have serious questions related to the implementation practice of the complex requirements for organic food. Some recent scandals in this sector have made clear that in several areas an improvement of the current practises are necessary, e.g. the separation practises between organic and conventional foods.
The aim of this “Code of good practice for organic food processing” (COPOF) is to give companies a comprehensive introduction to the most important requirements of the organic food sector applicable for the daily practice. Additionally, the COPOF offers a number of tools that make it possible to:
a) improve the production skills effectively,
b) improve and maintain the quality of organic foods and
c) guarantee the safety of organic products.
The basic idea of this publication was that the responsible persons in companies producing and handling the products have a strongest influence on the final products characteristics themselves. Therefore, their knowledge, abilities and the structural conditions for their work are most important factors to ensure a high quality and safety of the produced food.