Food Ingredients First Magazine
Author: Kimberly J. Decker
“That’s certainly Isabelle Favato’s view. “Yes, we welcome the new rules,” enthuses the director of quality at US-based ingredient supplier Global Organics. “This is definitely a step toward improving visibility for organic products’ origin and movement, and it adds a layer of control for US imports.”
“Favato concedes: ‘Compliance with the new rule won’t be a clear switch from day one.’ In fact, she says, ‘there have already been hiccups, and there’ll be more, for sure.’ For example, ‘as soon as we heard of the new rules, we contacted our suppliers as a precautionary measure to inform them,’ Favato recalls. ‘In November 2023, we provided guidelines and technical support and asked them to provide complete NOP ICs with all our shipments coming into the US.’ And how’d that go? ‘To date, we can tell that this has been a learning curve-for everyone.’
In particular, procedures for creating the electronic ICs caused confusion. Notes Favato, the ‘USDA didn’t publish any 2023-2024 instructions for completing NOP ICs, so we started by following the only published guidelines currently available on the USDA website: ‘Instructions for Completing an NOP Import Certificate.'” Only later did they find out ‘the hard way’ that those guidelines didn’t reflect the SOE’s new requirements, Favato says. ‘And what we’ve learned after three months of testing is that USDA has been setting up a system that sort-of ‘auto-populates’ NOP ICs from certified operations’ records available in the USDA Integrity Database-all of which is to say that it was a good call to start testing the process in 2023, well before the deadline.'”
