Two leading Canadian organizations in the food and beverage industry have formed an alliance to better service food manufacturers and end consumers. COR (Kashruth Council of Canada) – Canada’s largest kosher certification agency, and GFTC (Guelph Food Technology Centre), Canada’s leader in providing companies with food safety, training, quality and technical solutions, have solidified a partnership that will make food safety and kosher certification more readily accessible.
COR certifies over 45,000 products at over 1000 facilities across Canada and around the world. With food safety increasingly on the minds of consumers and regulatory agencies, many of COR’s clients have evolving food safety needs that require enhanced expertise. Enter GFTC – Canada’s food safety experts, who are now COR’s exclusive food safety consultants and will be working with COR certified companies interested in implementing a food safety program.
Likewise, GFTC works with over 1500 businesses in the food and beverage industry annually in Canada, and in 25 other countries across the globe. They provide training and consulting services in the areas of food safety, quality, packaging and product development. They also provide auditing services to a wide range of public and private standards including SQF, BRC and CanadaGAP. Nutritional labelling, pilot plant, sustainability and a host of other services rounds out GFTC’s offerings. But one thing GFTC doesn’t do is kosher certification. And kosher is big business. $200 billion of kosher food products are sold in North American annually, and it has been growing at a rate of 15% year over year for the past 10 years. In fact, more than 1/3rd of the products in supermarket shelves are certified kosher. That’s where COR comes in. As the largest kosher certification agency in Canada, and one of the largest in the world, COR is well equipped to act as GFTC’s exclusive kosher consultant to facilitate any GFTC company interested in going kosher.
“The kosher certification process requires very specific expertise and COR has that expertise,” says Paul Medeiros, Director of Consulting Services at GFTC. “That’s why we are thrilled to be teaming up with COR, Canada’s largest kosher certification agency, because we want to make kosher certification available to any of our business partners who are interested in it.”
GFTC will showcase the partnership by featuring COR at one of its “Innovation Breakfasts” where COR will explain what kosher is and make the business case for going kosher.
Similarly, COR will be offering its companies an exclusive one hour GFSI overview webinar to COR clients by GFTC. “Because of a perceived association between kosher and food safety, many of our companies have asked COR if we can implement food safety programs on their behalf,” says Richard Rabkin Director of Marketing & Business Development at COR. “But this too requires certain expertise, and GFTC is undoubtedly the industry leader.”
These are only the first steps in the COR-GFTC partnership, and they will no doubt expand as the needs of the respective stakeholders evolve. “We couldn’t be happier about our new relationship with GFTC,” says Rabkin. Echoing the sentiments Medeiros concludes, “While kosher is new territory for us, we are excited and optimistic about where this new venture will lead.”
For more information about COR please visit www.cor.ca
For more information about GFTC please visit www.gftc.ca