Partner Article

Direct Food Ingredients Secures Universal Feed Assurance Scheme Accreditation

Direct Food Ingredients is celebrating exceptional success after achieving a highly-coveted accreditation by the Universal Feed Assurance Scheme; a merchants’ standard introduced to regulate the production and delivery of livestock feed and the supply of feed from factory to farm.

The UFAS accreditation has been put in place to prevent feed safety incidents within the agriculture feed industry and is used to form the EU Food and Feed legislation. The main objective of UFAS is to ensure animal food that is supplied to UK farms is safe so that the human food chain is protected.

Steve Loake, Managing Director of Direct Food Ingredients, “Receiving the merchant accreditation means a great deal to us as we are now recognised as an approved supplier by UFAS. This means our buyers can rest assured that all of our raw materials meet the highest possible industry standards, giving everyone in the supply chain confidence and assurance of quality and consistency.”

With a strict code of practice, all accredited UFAS merchants must undergo annual auditing processes, where sites are tested on their finished feed standards, cleanliness and working procedures to comply with necessary standards.

The UFAS scheme dovetails the UK Livestock Assurance Scheme (Red Tractor Assurance and Quality Meat Scotland) which is a requirement for locally sourced livestock products by all major supermarkets.

Further to this success, Direct Food Ingredients have also been awarded with the British Retail Consortium Global Standard for Agents and Broker Accreditation for a second year running.

The BRC accreditation is an internationally recognised standard developed to provide a framework to manage product safety, quality and legality for businesses in the food and food packing industries which buy, sell or facilitate the trade of products.

With five key focuses, the Global Standard concentrates on senior management commitment and continued improvement, hazard and risk assessment, product safety and quality management system, supplier and subcontracted service management and personnel.

Direct Food Ingredients now boasts a significant triple accreditation, following hot on the heels of the company achieving certification from Informed-Sport and Informed-Choice - a quality assurance program for suppliers to the sports nutrition industry.

“The triple accreditation gives us a remarkable advantage in this forever expanding industry and we are delighted to have been awarded with such prestigious industry accolades,” added Steve.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rachael .