by any producer, buyer or auditor
•;A;standard;that;is;flexible;enough;to;adapt;as;science;re-
veals better practices and limits
A Technical Working Group (TWG) was formed, compris-
ing over 150 volunteer technical experts in the areas of food
safety and growing and handling practices for a wide variety
of commodities and growing regions. In face-to-face meetings
over 5 months, supported by a variety of grower and buying
organizations that hosted the meetings, the TWG reviewed
teer organization of fresh produce stakeholders. United Fresh
Produce Association, which had coordinated the efforts from
the beginning, will serve as Secretariat for management of the
Harmonized Standards.
Official versions of the Harmonized Standards will continue to be freely accessible and downloadable from the United
Fresh website. Audit organizations that choose to offer audits
using the Harmonized Standards will sign no-cost licensing
agreements with United Fresh, confirming that 1) they will use
“...the produce industry came together to reduce the audit burden that
it had enabled by accepting and supporting a wide variety of food safety
audit standards...”
13 commonly accepted fresh produce food safety standards,
identified the commonalities and selected the words from
each that best suited a common standard, without sacrificing
any food safety considerations. Recognizing that GAPs audits
can extend from the field through on-farm processes like cooling, storage and transportation, the TWG split the standard
into two. The results were the Field Operations and Harvesting Harmonized Food Safety Standard, applicable to all field
operations and greenhouses, and the Post-harvest Harmonized
Food Safety Standard, applicable only to those growing operations that have such facilities on-site.
Once the standards were drafted, teams of auditors and
buyers field-tested them at over a dozen volunteer operations, many of which had not been involved in drafting the
standards, ranging from large operations to the smallest family
operations, and for commodities as diverse as potatoes, ber-ries, leafy greens and citrus. These “pilot audits” resulted in
a few changes to the draft standards, but everyone involved
agreed that the Harmonized Standards achieved the parameters of the Steering Committee and could replace all of the
GAPs food safety audit checklists currently in use.
Where We Are
Operations Committee and Standards Policies. The Steering
Committee recognized that completion of the Harmonized
Standards would not be sufficient. To be sustainable beyond
their initial use, policies and procedures would need to be
established for how the standards would be managed and
maintained. To that end, they commissioned an “Operations
Committee.” Led by Wegmans Vice President of Produce
Dave Corsi, the Operations Committee was charged with rec-
ommending responsibilities for ownership of the standards,
how audit organizations would access and be trained on the
standards, how disputes about the interpretation of the stan-
dards would be managed and how revisions to the standards
would be managed. The Operations Committee completed its
charge in five short meetings, concluding the following: The
Harmonized Standards will continue to be “owned” by the
industry, represented by the TWG, which will remain a volun-
the Harmonized Standards verbatim, 2) all auditors perform-
ing audits to the Harmonized Standards will be trained using
official, uniform training materials and 3) any unresolved
disputes between auditors and auditees of how the standards
are to be interpreted will be brought to a “Calibration Com-
mittee” (see below) for resolution.