By Sherika Hall
KINGSTON, Jamaica, (JIS) – The certification of CARIB Brewery Limited has been hailed as a regional success by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the CARICOM Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality (CROSQ), Deryck Omar.
The brewery, located in Basseterre, St Kitts and Nevis, was presented with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 22000:2018 certification for food safety management system at a handover ceremony, held at the facility on Friday, July 14.
As a regional standards and quality development and project management agency, CROSQ brought the management of CARIB Brewery into a relationship with the talented regional resources available from consultants and the National Certification Body of Jamaica (NCBJ).
Omar said that the collaborative efforts have resulted in the “magic” that was celebrated.
“At CROSQ, we love a good celebration, especially when it brings about regional success such as this, involving a number of Member States, because NCBJ is from Jamaica, CROSQ is based in Barbados, the consultants are from Trinidad and Tobago, and of course we have the St Kitts and Nevis Bureau of Standards. So, it was truly a CARICOM endeavour,” he said.
The successful certification of the St. Kitts and Nevis-based brewery is the result of several strategic relationships, enabled by funding under the 11th European Development Fund (EDF) Economic Partnership Agreement Programme.
Against this backdrop, the CROSQ CEO shared that the entity “has been using this programme to assist institutions and the private sector to address some of the challenges they have identified in eliminating technical barriers to trade and developing the quality of our products and services”.
He added that this “ISO 22000 certification … is an achievement that is not only celebrated by CARIB Brewery and the rest of St Kitts and Nevis, but across the region.”
The certification is also a success for Jamaica, as the accredited Certifying Body was the NCBJ, an independent unit of the Bureau of Standards Jamaica.
CARIB Brewery is also the first company to be certified to the ISO 22000:2018 standard by the NCBJ.
General manager at the NCBJ, Navenia Wellington-Ford, said that the certification was a celebration of an outstanding milestone achieved.
“Food safety is everybody’s business and when CARIB Brewery made its strategic decision to implement the standard, they were thinking food safety, their company and their customers,” she added. “The team for implementing the system in their operations and for going further by seeking third-party assessment – certification.”
General manager Ford expressed: “We are here to celebrate and to congratulate the movement that we are seeing in St Kitts and Nevis [and] across the region as we embrace quality and food safety.”
