At the end of last year, 2021, John I. Haas was incredibly proud to be awarded FSSC 22000 Certification by the NQA.

“With this new FSSC 2200 certification, our customers will recognize the value of peace of mind that comes from knowing that, in both the manufacturing we conduct and how we source our hops, we have systems in place to ensure the highest standards in everything we do,” said James Nathan, Director of Quality at John I. Haas.  

“We’ve always been incredibly focused on quality and safety,” noted Amy Johnson, Vice President of Manufacturing and Quality at John I. Haas. “In recent years, the USDA and the FDA have been working to align proper standards with food quality and food defense. At the same time, there’s been a change in the industry—and brewers, on the whole, are looking more carefully at their suppliers to ensure we have proper food safety and food defense standards in place.” 

“Being FSSC 22000 Certified is a big commitment,” Johnson, noted, “It was a two-to-three-year process that entailed completely rewriting our Integrated Management System, which drives all of our quality operations here at HAAS. We hope this signals to our customers just how important they are to us and, by extension, how important their customers’ safety is as well.” 

“FSSC 22000 Certification is about comprehensive food safety and food defense, which prevents someone from intentionally tampering with our product,” Nathan commented. “It was a process of codifying and unifying strict quality standards we already had in place. At the same time, we implemented some new policies, updated our GMP policies, and our hazard analysis and critical food compliance systems,” he said. “We strengthened everything from our environmental monitoring programs to pest control to our supply approval programs.”

“It’s really about working to reduce risk, and specifically food safety risk, overall,” James added. “Haas being FFSC 2200 Certified means that we have third-party experts that visit us, evaluate us, and verify our systems. It means that we are absolutely meeting the highest standards and expectations for the products that we produce and that they are safe for our customers to use, and for their customers to consume.” 

Cheers!