Cor Groenveld Interview - day one of the Global Food Safety Conference

This morning at the Global Food Safety Conference, we talked to Cor Groenveld, LRQA's Global Food Safety Expert. Here is what Cor had to say about the conference and about the organisations gathered here in Washington, D.C. (Listen to or download the audio podcast here)

I’m in Washington DC, the capitol of the United States, and I’m attending the Global Food Safety Conference of the GFSI, the Global Food Safety Initiative. This is the largest food safety conference in the world, and this is the tenth year they have organised it, and this is the first time it’s in the US, outside of Europe, so that’s great. What we see here is a high commitment to food safety, we have seven hundred delegates in the conference, and it will last until this Friday.

J.P. Suarez on the role of the GFSI

J.P. Suarez, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Walmart Stores International and chairman of the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), talked to the 700 person Global Food Safety Conference audience about what the GFSI does and does not do.

On what the GFSI does, he said,

I think that cost efficiency is one of the key aspects of GFSI, and the rationales behind GFSI, and quite candidly, I’m not sure we are there yet and we need to make sure that cost efficiency is one of our objectives, continues be realised, without compromising the quality of food safety inspections and audits that we do in our factories and in our plants and in our farms.

On what the GFSI does NOT do, JP added,

GFSI does not make policy for retailers or manufacturers, those companies do. We don’t make policy for the standard owners, we do not undertake at GFSI any independent accreditation or certification activities.