'The Global Food Safety Initiative was launched two years ago after a global task force was created and the first International Food Safety conference was held last May,' Byrnes began.

Byrnes said it was simply the 'assurance that food will not cause harm to the consumer when it is prepared and/ or eaten according to its intended use'.

Byrnes said that is it obvious retailers want to sell products which are safe to their consumers and which will not cause any harm. As such, GFSI has created a new logo that it is preparing to release shortly. He accepted that retailers are more concerned about acquiring the food in the first place than whether it is contaminated or not, but conceded this is their second major issue.

'When you try to buy food as a retailer, what comes first is the availability of the product and then you look at food safety. So food quantity comes before food safety,' he said.

Recognising this, the GFSI logo aims to represent a scheme to benchmark food safety standards worldwide, effectively building and implementing an international early warning system.

As a benchmark model of the way food safety used to be, Byrnes stated: 'Retailers performed inspections or audits of their supplies themselves, or asked a third party to do this. Inspections or audits took place on a national scale. No true international certification and accreditation schemes were in place, which meant there were incomparable auditing results.' Now, with the new logo and system, there may still be no standard but the GFSI is identifying a way to make existing standards more universally understood and accepted. 'Writing a new standard is a very long and difficult process,' explained Byrnes. 'No existing standards are good enough to qualify as the global standard. But we do know what we want and have defined a criteria. Key elements are a food safety management system, good practices and a conformation to HACCP specifications.' A rudimentary version of the third edition of the GFSI guidance document will be available in two to three weeks on its website: www.globalfoodsafety.com

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