The new issue of the Consumer Products Standards Issue 4 in 2016 has been fully revised to:
- Recognise the diversity of products included within Consumer Products
- Align the Standard with the actual buying expectations of specifiers whilst encouraging continuous improvement
- Simplify the requirement and terminology to make it easier to understand
- Widen the scope to include products for wholesale sale and components/raw materials
- Ensure that requirements were risk based
- Introduce an entry Foundation level and Higher level to encourage continuous improvement
To achieve these objectives we have divided Consumer Products into two separate Standards
- Global Standard for Consumer Products – General Merchandise
- Global Standard for Consumer Products – Personal Care and Household
Each of the Standards can be certificated at either Foundation Level or at Higher level. This enables both flexibility to reflect customer’s needs depending on the product sector and product /brand risk and provides a clear pathway for continuous development.
The Standards have been developed by groups of industry experts to ensure they are rigorous and detailed but clearly focused on the key issues to produce safe, legal products in accordance with customer quality requirements. The Standards provide a framework to manage product safety, integrity, legality and quality, and the operational controls for these criteria.
Both Standards focus on:
- The importance of management commitment
- Product risk assessments to ensure the products design is safe and legal before production
- Process risk assessment as a tool to ensure that potential issues in the production of the products have been understood, prioritized and effectively managed
- The design and maintenance of the factory and production environment to ensure this is suitable to manufacture and protect products from contamination
- An effective product testing and sampling process
