One of the many things that Sovereign Flavors can be proud of is achieving and maintaining a BRC Certification. As the world becomes more food safety and food quality conscious, it is becoming an industry standard for vendors to carry a third-party GFSI (Global Food Safety Initiative) certification, and BRC (British Retail Consortium) qualifies as such.

Maintaining this certification requires that we are audited annually, and this year, we completed our BRC audit on July 13 and 14. The auditor reviewed our food safety and quality programs and thoroughly examined our plant. A handful of employees in the Production, Warehouse, and Quality departments were also interviewed to ensure that we are in compliance with these policies.

Another crucial part of the audit is the Traceability Test. The purpose of this exercise is to test the efficacy of our Quality Systems and Traceability program so that in the event of a real food safety recall, we can identify how much of an ingredient was purchased, which products it was used in, and which customers received the affected products. With the help of the Quality, Purchasing, and Accounting departments, we successfully performed 3 traceability exercises.

To add to the challenge, our auditor also had an auditor auditing how our auditor audits (try saying that 3 times fast!), which meant an extra set of eyes poring over our programs and facility. At the end of our analysis, our auditor had nothing but praise for our team and was very impressed with how knowledgeable and conscientious our team is.

Although this audit was only 20 hours long over the course of two days, our team spent months preparing for it. We are proud to announce this is our 5th year successfully passing this audit while also maintaining a double A (AA) rating – the highest rating achievable. A huge thank you to the many departments and team members for all their hard work in helping Sovereign Flavors achieve this milestone. We look forward to doing this again next year and continuing to pass along the highest level of excellence to our customers!