Which BRC Accreditation should Drinking Straws come under?

Hi all

 

Hopefully this is the correct forum for the question.

 

I would like to know what your thoughts on the Accreditation of Drinking Straws should be. As far as the BRC is concerned, this is a Consumer Item - but please consider the following:

 

The intended use for the straw is to drink from a container. For this purpose, we assume the container is sealed and the straw is used to pierce the container to get the liquid out.

 

The liquid is a food stuff, therefore is BRC Food.

The container is used to hold the food stuff, so therefore would be High Care Packaging.

 

The straw in this case would be penetrating the High Care packaging and being used to drink the food stuff - so should this straw not be held to the same standards as the High Care Packaging?

 

It seems nonsensical to allow the straw to meet only the Consumer Standard when the intended use of the straw means it should maintain the same standards as High Care Packaging.

 

Can someone shed some light onto this please?

I'm quite certain BRC Food Packaging high hygiene Big Gaz.

 

Cheers,

Simon :santa:

Thanks Simon, as I suspected.

 

Nice to be able to get alternative opinions. Just for clarity, after asking the BRC themselves - they said Consumer Items, and suggested we asked an audit body instead. Bonkers.

IIRC the Consumer Goods standard has now bifurcated into a "general" and a "personal care and household" (sort of analogous to high hygeine) version, so potentially/hopefully they're envisioning it sitting in the latter if not in high hygiene packaging.

Agree the response is rather surreal though. If your cert body doesn't know, then they'll ask BRC, who'll tell them to ask themselves, buy they won't know, so they'll ask BRC, and the loop will continue indefinitely until it creates a singularity and all of the BRC standards are subsumed into a single global standard for regions of infinite spacetime curvature. Or something.

 

Curiously they do list "food wrap, bags" and "foil and film" in the category 4 (paper and paper-mix products) and category 9 (plastic and rubber products) for consumer goods, although these sound very much like packaging to me.

Maybe BRC's answer was entirely due to them having confused themselves too much to know for certain, and they'll stick it through on whichever category the cert body requests for this type of product? :dunno:

Should be as high if not higher than high hygiene packaging as children put them in their mouths.

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