Omega Ingredients Achieve Industry First

24 Mar 2017 --- Omega Ingredients Limited has become the first company in the industry to achieve a BRC AA grade to version 7 with the additional approval to the new Traded Items Module.

The company has been awarded the BRC AA grade for “The blending of liquid and powder flavor and fragrance ingredients, packed into product specific packaging.”

"This is a certification to an Internationally Recognised Quality Management system, focused on Food Safety – it provides customers with a high level of confidence in our ability to manage supply chain maintaining food safety at all levels," CEO Steve Pearce told NutritionInsight.

"Achieving and maintaining BRC certification at the AA level is almost an expected requirement for obtaining business with major food companies particularly in the UK."

The new certification is the result of an audit by Isoquar to The BRC Global Food Standard, which assesses a company’s food safety standards across their supply chain and sets the benchmark for good manufacturing practice.

Omega Ingredients, who specialize in creating award-winning natural flavors for the food and beverage trade, says that the three-day audit and resulting certificate is a significant vote of confidence in the company, which was founded in 2001.

"We developed a culture of continuous improvement across the business, completed risk assessments related to food safety and implemented relevant controls, as well as provided extensive training for our team to ensure ownership of quality in all that we do,” Pearce explains.

"The structure of processes and procedures implemented has enabled us to have the highest level of confidence that the daily working practices are most effective and are integrated into our daily activities."

"Our biggest challenge was the fact that we are a team of 16 and our staff had to work on implementing this and still maintain high levels of customer service in everything else that we do. This has been a major investment for our business but has certainly been very beneficial to us."

"We have been registered for 5 years and each external audit has brought benefits to us in terms of having a “cold pair of expert eyes” challenging what we do."

Pearce explains that the company now has the USA market in mind.

"In the USA, the published Food Safety Modernization Act is a similar quality management system with some additional requirements over and above those of BRC Global Food Standard, having achieved our registration, we are well placed to meet the requirements for the USA marketplace."

The achievement of Omega Ingredients builds on the recent success of its newly launched product ΩMegaSweet, a natural flavor system designed to combat the challenge of sugar reduction within the beverage industry ahead of the Sugar Tax.

ΩMegaSweet enables companies to reduce the sugar content in their products by up to 50%, with minimal calorie contribution.