Each process is a mosaic in quality assurance.
HACCP? Kaizen? House of Quality? Risk management? All these are the “section headings“ for tools which contribute to leading a company in the best way possible. All these tools are bundled together in a management system depending on necessity and philosophy.
Each year, we undergo the so-called IFS audit: both locations are inspected once per year by independent auditors according to IFS standards.
The IFS standards describe and evaluate which points a company must fulfil to be able to claim that their management system works in practice, using a catalogue of questions. The aim and purpose of all this is the question of whether we put our quality management into practice and how we could further improve this. Each year we pass these audits at a high level.
The QS testing system also ensures a cross-stage quality assurance in meat and meat products; this begins with testing the animal feed and continues into agriculture and the slaughterhouse up to trade. The QS checks our operations in terms of hygiene standards, traceability or quality assurance measures.
As we have our own customers who produce products for the German market using our raw material, we are also audited by QS. However, QS do not publish their own guidelines: instead, they check, for example, using the Austrian AMA guidelines. Casually speaking: the German QS is something like the TÜV for meat.
BRC stands for the ‘British Retail Consortium‘. This is an association of British retail companies, founded in London. The organisation defines the set of rules obligatory for several trade chains for suppliers in the food industry such as the BRC global standard. Our location in Straß is already certified according to this set of rules.
As the first of the Austrian meat processing businesses, Steirerfleisch and Jöbstl were first certified in accordance with the regulations of the ETI base code (Ethical Trade Initiative) in 2015.