Safety is our highest priority. Our Processing Plant’s Food Safety Objective (FSO) is to ensure that Interchick products are healthy, nutritious, and safe. We do this by:
Food safety policy
- Selling quality products that are free from physical, chemical, allergen, and pathogenic microbiological hazards. All our produce is monitored continuously by laboratory analysis and customer feedback.
- Ensuring traceability for all our products.
- Ensuring that the production environment and processes are up to local and international standards.
- Regularly assessing all employees and maintaining a strict safety culture in all departments. This culture is maintained through continuous training.
Our Hatchery is committed to:
- Hatching chicks to the highest level of customer satisfaction.
- Pursuing international food safety certifications for continuous improvement. This is achieved through constant application of technical innovations as they occur around the world.
Our Breeder and Broiler farms commit to:
- Ensuring that our chickens are reared in a biosecure environment, with regular biosecurity audits attaining a score of greater than 80%.
- Supplying chicken with fresh and potable water, while feeding them on a well-balanced, plant-based poultry diet.
- Monitoring feed, water and other samples – provided through our laboratory to ensure that they meet the required safety standards.
- Ensuring that our breeder farms supply the hatchery with clean and healthy hatching eggs.
Policies
To achieve our objectives, we rigorously apply the following policies:
Technology:
- Our aim is to process, sell and distribute safe, healthy, and nutritious poultry products to meet our consumers’ highest expectations. We achieve this by following the latest technological developments around the world.
Compliance:
- We follow internationally recognised standards, including the FSSC 22000, as well as Specific Tanzania Standards, to the satisfaction of the local regulatory authority. We ensure that our products and processes have undergone appropriate government inspection and approval by the Directorate of Veterinary Services, the Tanzania Meat Board and the Tanzania Bureau of Standards.
- We carry out regular audits to ensure that our farms and other suppliers meet our standards.
- We only use appropriate and approved raw materials to produce quality poultry products.
- In our production value chain, we ensure strict adherence to Interchick’s Antimicrobial Usage and Animal Welfare Policies.
- We utilise processes and results from our in-house laboratory and our sister company ISO certified laboratory (ISO 17025) to produce meat that is safe and wholesome for human consumption. This is achieved through continuous monitoring of microbiological contamination and hygiene levels.
- Our produce complies with Farms Initiative’s Responsible Minimum Standards, and Interchick’s Animal Welfare Policy.
- We maintain a pollution-free working environment by adhering to The Environmental Management Act of 2004 (Section 114-138) on waste disposal.
- We facilitate third party audits by our clients and Food safety organisations to ensure compliance to own and international standards.
- We use our sister company, Interchick Ltd Laboratory, which is accredited with ISO 17025.
Traceability
- We ensure that our traceability system, anchored on Interchick’s Farm to Fork policy, is robust enough to maintain product quality.
Staff
- We ensure that our staff satisfy relevant food safety requirements. They undergo a food handlers’ test and regular screening for pathogens of public health importance. We communicate this policy and develop the skills of our staff through continuous training.
Customer concerns
- Any concerns about safety from our customers are addressed through root- cause analysis.
