WE CARE - A NEW STANDARD FOR FOOD

In the last two decades, certification of companies, products and processes has spread rapidly. Certification brings two advantages: First, a standard is implemented in companies that incorporates the current leading know-how on the intended development goal. Through its application, the affected processes in the companies are improved. Thus, depending on the standard, benefits for the environment, product safety and quality, for suppliers from the global south, and other goals are achieved more safely and in a more effective way. The author sees this as the greatest benefit from certification.

An additional benefit, which is often seen as the sole benefit, comes from the subsequent certification. This has two steps, each with its own value. First, there is the regular auditing by external experts. This identifies possible deficits in the application of standards and, on this basis, they can be mitigated or eliminated. In this way, the benefits from the application of the standard for the company and society are continuously increased. Finally, as a last step, if all parameters are met, there is a certificate. This is suitable for providing third parties with reliable information that the certified company or product actually complies fully with the requirements of the standard. For partners in the value chain, other stakeholders, e.g. environmental associations and consumers, the certificate and an often associated logo is the quickly recognizable shorthand for conformity with the standard. This is a great advantage for communication, because the standards are often extensive and only known in detail by experts.

Now a new product is coming onto the certification market in the year in February 2021. FiBL has released a "Management-Standard for the implementation and certification of sustainability requirements at company sites and in supply chain management for companies in the food industry" (https://we-care-siegel.org). Several voices on the Internet immediately hailed this project as the "New Organic". Probably because the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture is the developer and in marketer. What's in it?

The subject of We care

We care is divided into four segments, each of which is assigned specific fields of action (Fig.).

Figure see in the German version of this blog

The project goals

The developers describe the following statements as the goals of We Care:

1. We care aims to close a gap with regard to the certification of corporate responsibility along the food supply chain.
2. The developers describe their work result as a "sustainability standard for the food industry". In doing so, they add another interpretation to the variety of definitions of the term "sustainability". At We care, sustainability in the food industry consists of the four basic building blocks of corporate governance, supply chain management, employee responsibility and environmental management. This is different from how the UN and EU, for example, define the term. However, We care can also be interpreted as a specific application of the generally accepted understanding of the term.
3. On the website the standard is offered for companies and for consumers. Both target groups should benefit by confirming, through the certification of qualified third parties and through the awarding of the seal, that the food chain produces high quality products through a variety of parameters to be respected. Some of the terms used by We care in its self-portrayal are intended to inform the reader briefly about the issues that play a role for We care: fair and environmentally friendly production, ecological, social, fair, overall actions of a company, supply chain management, all important ecological and social aspects, clarity and transparency, local region, GMO-free, biodiversity, animal welfare, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity, suppliers and sub-suppliers, human rights, adequate prices for raw materials, payment according to collective agreements or minimum wage, people in the Global South. One suspects that a wide range of topics will be covered.

Experience shows that not only companies (profitability, image) and consumers (health, "saving the planet") will deal with the standard, but also consumer organizations, environmental organizations, farmers, health experts, bankers, scientists, politicians, and so on. One can be curious about the coming, public discussion.

How certification and the seal are awarded

The standard includes a section detailing the certification process. The specifications concern the following aspects:

• Audit duration
• audit procedure
• Evaluation and calculation of results
• Recognition rules
• Certification levels
• Certification cycle
• Certificate issuance
• Seal and use of the seal
• Requirements for certification bodies and auditors

These methodological elements correspond to the requirements of the relevant ISO standards and the current practices in the industry.

The words "digital" and "laptop" do not appear in the standard description. We assume here that the usual know-how should be applied in this area as well. Otherwise, it could become rather tedious for the auditor to process the described procedure for evaluation and result calculation without errors and quickly. It can be assumed that two equally well trained auditors for the identical operating situation will not determine a very similar or identical score with a high degree of probability, which can then also have an impact on the calculated certification level.

The seal is used in the value chain and by the final producer towards consumers.

Possible focal points for future self-evaluations

From practical certification experience, two things stand out that still need to prove their usefulness when applied in the coming years:

1. For the majority of We care's areas of action, there are already proven specific standards and certification programs, each of which is widely used and well suited for third party compliance testing in practice. Some examples[1]:
   • Corporate governance: ISO 9001, ISO 9004, ISO 10001, ISO 19600, ISO 26000, ISO 27001, ISO 28000, ISO 31000, ISO 37001, CSR plans and programs, GMP, ISEAL Code of Good Practice, ...
   • Supply chain management: ISO 19600, ISO 20400, ISO 22000, IFS, FSSC 22000, ISO 28000, ISO 31000, ISO 37001, ...
   • Employee responsibility: ISO 9001, ISO 19600, ISO 27001, ISO 27001, ISO 28000, ISO 31000, ISO 37001, SMETA, ...
   • Environmental management: ISO 14001, ISO 14005, ISO 14022, ISO 14040, ISO 14045, ISO 14064, ISO 19600, ISO 31000, ISO 50000, EWS, ISEAL Code of Good Practice, ...
   • (Food Safety and Quality[2]: ISO 22000, ISO 28000, ISO 37001, Organic, BRC, FSSC 22000, GlobalG.A.P., Halal, IFS, QS, Vegan, ...).

Certification standards always have the methodological difficulty of not being too narrow on the one hand and remaining understandable and manageable for users on the other. In the meantime, mutual recognition of criteria and audit results or combined audits of different, specialized standards are successfully used to resolve conflicts. We care also makes use of this to some extent. Practice will show how We care's standard, which is based on a very broad range of indicators, satisfies the interests of entrepreneurs, stakeholders and society, or even brings order to the certificate jungle.

2. The 164 criteria of We care are mostly formulated in the certification standard in such a way that they are intended to cover a relatively broad range of issues. This makes them unspecific and not clearly assessable.

Example 1: Corporate principles, criterion 4: "If significant business partners are located abroad, the company has also published its principles and attitude in other languages, at least in English, to enable business partners to take note of them."

Comment: Is compliance achieved when partners are given an opportunity to take note of policies, or should the auditor assess evidence of business partners' compliance with policies to determine actual assumption of responsibility in the supply chain?

Example 2: Emergency and Crisis Management, Criterion 1: "The company has defined a documented procedure for managing incidents, emergency situations and crises that includes sustainability-related issues."

Comment: Is compliance achieved when there is a paper that describes some measures for groundwater protection and air pollution control? Shouldn't it be better evaluated whether this paper is understood by employees and whether the measures are occasionally trained and evaluated?

The two examples stand for the continuous methodology how criteria are defined at We care. Regarding the manageability of such combined criteria, there is the experience in certification practice that conformity is often not clearly assessable, because its appearance is determined by a number of individual sub-factors. This leads to useless procedures such as "30% conformity" or "75% conformity", which excludes a one-to-one, objective and valid conformity assessment for the company according to the underlying ISO standards (e.g. ISO 19011, ISO 17000, ISO 17021). In addition, it is not sufficient in qualified certification practice to determine and document "conformity" or "non-conformity" alone. The auditor should record in the audit report, by means of a mnemonic or a short group of words, why he assessed with "compliant" or "non-compliant". Otherwise, his report cannot be understood by the assessor and/or certifier. The report would also not be usable in the event of a later dispute on the details of the audit results. The standard does not address whether/how to document why the auditor determined the documented assessment result for the very complex indicators (see examples above).

We wish the developers luck and success

The will of the developers to make a big impact is clearly recognizable. The standard closes an existing gap in the certification market for food. We wish the developers of We care success and luck for their successful market entry.