Our users know Certifeye inside out. How does the platform help them with recurring administrative work? Today we give the floor to Anton Heintjes, account manager, and Tom Nijhof, quality manager at Jonker & Schut. They have been working with Certifeye since 2021 and are happy to share their experiences in packaging and repackaging powdered dairy products and certificate management.

‘Certifeye makes certificate management scalable which is super important to us’

‘It doesn’t matter how many suppliers you have to request and manage certificates and documents from. If you secure them with a well-functioning system like Certifeye, numbers don’t matter. Certifeye makes certificate management scalable and that scalability is super important to us,’ says Anton Heintjes, account manager at Jonker & Schut. His colleague and quality manager Tom Nijhof adds: ‘The companies we supply products to want to know whether our suppliers and ourselves are certified. With Certifeye, we can very easily check who and what has been approved and manage our extensive certificate management.’

Strict controls

The bulk of Jonker & Schut’s production chain consists of powdered dairy products, which are subject to strict supervision by a variety of regulatory organisations. The organisation has the appropriate halal and kosher certificates and thus a well-deserved place in the associated supply chain. Added to this are ongoing audits by the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) and the Netherlands Controlling Body for Quality Affairs (COKZ). All this adds up to around 50 audits a year.

Accurate and careful chain registration

Certification bodies from all over the world visit the company to check whether the products they work with consist of kosher and halal-certified raw materials. Every year, hundreds of certificates and documents are requested for this purpose and managed with the online platform. After all, many foods we consume every day contain dairy components: from baking products, bread, soft drinks and chocolate to beer, sports nutrition and even medicine. This is a wide range of products. Upon delivery of the products, Jonker & Schut must also be able to present its own certifications.

Gatekeeper function to safeguard the chain

The processes require accurate and careful chain registration. ‘Jonker & Schut fulfils a gatekeeper function in the chain,’ says Anton. ‘We are a service company, not a product owner. Customers buy powders and then sell them. We pack and transport. Upon delivery, we have to be able to prove that the products we transport have actually been produced kosher and halal. Someone has to secure the chain. To manage that process, we use Certifeye.’

Hours spent on mail traffic

Previously, required certificates were stored in folders on a computer. If anything changed, Jonker & Smit’s quality controllers spent hours sending e-mails around. Tom: ‘We did not get alerted when a certificate expired. Every year, hundreds of e-mails went out asking departments, customers and suppliers whether documents needed replacing or updating. You often got back incomplete information, or the message that the rest would follow or come a bit later. Of course, that didn’t happen and you had to continue the hassle’.

Smooth certificate management

‘This process now runs much more smoothly with Certifeye. The platform takes a burden off of our shuolders and keeps our certificate management up to date. Mails are automatically sent out when a new certificate is needed or an update is due.’ Ton and Anton foresee that certificate delivery and management will only increase in the future. ‘Customers, suppliers and manufacturers increasingly want to know exactly what products consist of and where they come from.’

Certificate management as an integral part of QMS

Good certificate and document management requires good organisation and record-keeping. ‘Laws and regulations are changing by the day. There is more and more supervision coming our way, as we sail along with the customer’s requirements. For us, Certifeye is the only means by which we can secure these processes.’ This is why certificate management is an integral part of Jonker & Schut’s QMS. ‘Certifeye will be integrated deeper and deeper into our quality management, so we will use the platform more and more.’

Creating surveys and questionnaires with Certifeye

Anton and Tom are already preparing to use Certifeye for surveys and questionnaires towards suppliers. Quality-oriented questionnaires and customer satisfaction tests are being considered for this purpose. ‘We are CSR certified and are considering sending out questionnaires about this. But that is something for the future. Right now, we are mainly concerned with making sure that halal and kosher products are properly secured.’

Certifeye the solution in terms of convenience and time saving

Good examples lead to action. Relations at Jonker & Schut have had their eye on Certifeye and started using it. Anton: ‘I think many companies would be jealous of us if they saw how little time we spend on certificate management, because everything happens automatically here. If you want to incorporate certificate management in your quality system, Certifeye is the best solution given the convenience and time savings.’

Our users know Certifeye like the back of their hand. How does the platform help them with recurring administrative work? Today we give the floor to Paul Broersen and Eefje Peters- Elfering, respectively the Quality Manager and ICT Manager at Royal De Ree Holland B.V. They have been working with Certifeye since 2020 and are happy to share their story.

Royal De Ree Holland BV was looking for a simple tool to properly manage and control supplier certificates in one central location. The flower bulb specialist joined Certifeye in 2020, and developments in sustainability with the goal of purchasing 100% certified products by 2024 played an important role in this. 

Royal De Ree Holland has specialized in the development, packaging and transport of top quality flower bulbs and related products for over 100 years. The company supplies various markets in more than 40 countries and is preparing for the legislation surrounding the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The introduction of Directive means that from 2024 companies will be required to report on their impact on people and the climate . The Directive should ensure more transparency and better quality of information on sustainability. 

Grip on certification 

In Certifeye, Royal De Ree Holland manages various certificates: Global GAP, Global GAP IDA, MPS-GAP, MPS ABC and MPS SQ, FSC, PEFC, SEDEX, Skal, and the GRASP assessment. They come from suppliers of flower bulbs, plants, paper, cardboard, wood and plastic.
Paul Broersen, Quality Manager at Royal De Ree Holland: ‘ CSRD demands reliable data from the chain and flower bulb sector. With the number of certificates we process, we want to get a grip on this as much as possible through the certificate exchange and, in the future, perhaps also through writing out questionnaires to chain partners. Currently we are working on a data inventory for the CSRD: what information do we already have in-house and what information do we need to distribute?’ 

Manage and share certificates 

Royal De Ree Holland used to collect information from its chain partners directly from MPS. ICT Manager, Eefje Peters: ‘The disadvantage was that we could not check on the day whether suppliers were still certified. The delivery on information was triggered in response to the products delivery once a year. That information wasn’t enough for us.’ 

‘With Certifeye we manage certificates in one central place. Growers can manage their certificates themselves via their Certifeye Wallet and share them with us. The system processes these automatic requests from growers who do not use it. This way we create a total overview and we can properly manage the end dates of certificates. When they expire, we automatically receive a signal and can therefore sound the alarm with our suppliers in time.’ 

Reducing administrative pressure 

According to Eefje, suppliers’ reactions to the platform are mixed: ‘You have suppliers who join in immediately and you have suppliers who are reluctant to have any certificate information and related data recorded.’ ‘It is therefore not due to Certifeye, but rather to the entire certification process. Some growers still see it as an additional administrative burden. Paul: ‘Ultimately, Certifeye helps us keep an overview of where we are in the chain. This also makes it a good indicator of our goal to be able to purchase a 100% certified product by 2024. ‘ 

Eefje: ‘We hope that in the future Certifeye will become the platform where all growers in the flower bulb sector store their certificates and which will be used by everyone in th4e industry.’ 

Paul sees that more and more fellow exporters are joining the platform. ‘Because many growers have joined Certifeye at our request, other exporters can benefit from this and use the platform more easily. Certification simply requires registration and administration. We can’t take that away. But the more chain partners and sector peers join, the less administrative pressure for growers surrounding certification and the lower the threshold for sharing certificates is.’ 

CO2 Footprint Information Exchange 

The demand to share information is becoming increasingly urgent for the floriculture sector, which means that the challenge of getting the right data to the right customer is increasing. Paul: ‘Each customer has specific wishes in the field of sustainability, the environment and certification. That makes it complex to pass on the right information to the next link in the chain.’
The number of requests to share information about matters such as crop protection and packaging is still not too bad at Royal De Ree Holland. ‘We know that those questions will come and Certifeye can also help to collect, manage and share that data. Royal De Ree Holland has been CO2 neutral certified for scope 1&2 since 2021 and is now also mapping the impact of the entire chain (scope 3). With the help of Certifeye we can extract this information from the chain.’
 

Paul: ‘The CSRD obliges us to do so. In the field of environmental and social affairs, customers are beginning to cautiously ask where we stand as a company and what information we do and do not have. We are already being asked to share information in a number of areas and that will only increase. 

In the long run, we will therefore need more and more data. We already have a lot of general information with which we can fulfill part of our CSRD obligations. But the CSRD also asks for more and more specific and reliable data. We have been ISO 14001 certified since 1998 and we ensure that laws and regulations are implemented in our QMS. We are not surprised by the CSRD. Reporting on environmental matters is already in our system. The CSRD is an extension of that.’

Certification as an important indicator 

‘Everywhere around you hear what society thinks about environmental and social matters. We give substance to those things. Certification is an important indicator for us to see where we stand in the flower bulb sector. We are also a Sedex member, which looks at the social conditions within our company and our chain.
From an entrepreneurial perspective, I say that there are too many laws and regulations on the table for these kinds of things. On the other hand, the CSRD is a good step towards being able to report transparently within Europe on environmental matters and social conditions within the chain.’ 

What role does technology play in making your supply chain more sustainable? This question was the focus of the Sustainability in the agricultural supply chain event on 11 May in Woubrugge. We addressed topics like transparency, AI and the carbon footprint.

“Can we have a bit less transparency?”
Whereas Fred Vahlkamp, founder of Certifeye, is committed to making organisations in the supply chain more sustainable and stimulating openness between the parties involved in this on a daily basis, during his session he discussed the flip side of this phenomenon. Where does one draw the line between cooperation and safeguarding confidential business information? Moreover, who guarantees the reliability of all this information? Fred: “The trustworthiness of data can be categorised in Certifeye in 3 ways, and we do this based on stars. One star equals data entered by the user, two stars for data obtained through portals, and information obtained directly from the source gets three stars.” The latter category will grow faster and faster as automatic connections with certifying bodies increase. By establishing a link between that three-star data and the operation recorded in your own basic records, for example a purchase order, it is possible to have an independent party guarantee that the delivery conforms to the specified requirements. In doing so, you don’t have to indicate which grower or other supplier you bought the goods from. So, things can be a little less transparent from time to time.

HAK’s jars
Frans Kuijpers, head of HAK’s quality department, talked the visitors through the importance of quality management during product innovations. This included the history of the organisation, whose products are a staple in the Dutch store shelves. From day one, the HAK family has focused on sustainable business practices through local cultivation, going along with seasonal vegetables and developing recyclable packaging, among other developments. The glass jars we know so well are thus the result of almost 100 years of continuous research into how to improve in terms of people and the environment. How are they tackling this in 2023? “We hire young scientists and give them plenty of room to experiment. Do they come up with an idea? Does it work? Then we implement it.”

CertifAI
Our “homegrown” innovations were also featured during the event. Over the past year, our software developers have explicitly been developing in the field of artificial intelligence (AI – Artifical Intelligence). Recognising logic in documents, including certificates, is a priority here. The event’s visitors were given a demonstration of CertifAI’s capabilities. In this case, an image of an MPS certificate was presented to the AI tool. The software read the image and extracts the most important data from it: the type of certificate, the MPS number, the validity dates and the scope of the certificate. The use of AI becomes increasingly important for examining and structuring data so that it can be used for CSRD reporting, for example.

Standardisation of the Carbon Footprint
Finally, Henri Potze of Greenhouse Sustainability addressed the visitors about the carbon footprint. His organisation has been working for years to help companies identify their impact on the world around them to signal where improvement is possible. This month, they took a big step towards standardising the carbon footprint based on the so-called FLoriPEFCR. These are the European calculation rules for determining such a carbon footprint. With the Flori Footprint Tool, the “Declaration Footprint Calculation” can now be published, where information about the impact of one specific product through the entire production process is shown in a clear manner. VDE Plant was the first organisation to receive and to upload this declaraction to the Certifeye Wallet. Read more about this in the article “A 1st for both VDE Plant and Greenhouse Sustainability”.

Sustainability Goals
Last year, we challenged our visitors to think about their own future and sustainability. They wrote down their goals on our sustainability goal cards and had them stored in our vault for a year. During the event, we were allowed to share the contents of two of these cards with the audience. And what was the result? Most of the goals have since been achieved! There is just one electric car still waiting to be delivered.

New cards with new goals have been stored in our vault. We wish all visitors and speakers a sustainable year which exceeds all expectations. See you in 2024!

April marked not one but two celebrations around sustainability in the agri chain! VDE Plant, grower and breeder of tropical and air-puryifying plants, made an exciting announcement during the Horti Footprint Chain Program event. The organisation has concretised its Carbon Footprint, the details of which are publicly available in the Certifeye Wallet.

This makes VDE Plant the first member of the Certifeye platform to post its Carbon Footprint data to the Certifeye Wallet. The announcement also comes as a first for Greenhouse Sustainability, an organisation that has been working diligently to identify and reduce the environmental impact of companies. In collaboration with VDE Plant, they have now issued a Carbon Footprint statement and made it available as a shareable uniform declaration document in the Certifeye Wallet for the very first time.

VDE Plant has no secrets

Sustainability is of paramount importance to VDE Plant, which is reflected by the publicly sharing of the environmental impact of their products. The 16 categories included in Greenhouse Sustainability’s “Declaration Footprint Calculation” are made publicly available in the organisation’s Certifeye Wallet. This Wallet can be accessed from within the application, but also through a QR code printed on their products that allows for users outside of the platform to view the declaration. This is in line with Greenhouse Sustainability’s mission statement: “No words, but actions”. By making all sustainability information available, VDE Plant will be able to demonstrate how they are progressing down the path towards sustainability over the years.

One CO2 size to fit all?

Greenhouse Sustainability has been active in the agricultural sector for years, helping organisations calculate the impact of their operations on the world around us. This benefits not only the participating companies, but also their customers, since the information about their suppliers allow them to make informed choices about the sustainability of their chains.

Greenhouse Sustainability’s 1st lies in the standardisation of these calculations. Thanks to the declaration, which from now on can also be placed in the Certifeye Wallet, the CO2 impact of products can be seen in a glance. The calculation method of this tool corresponds to the so-called FloriPEFCR. These are the European calculation rules for determining, for example, the carbon footprint.

For now, this declaration is based on information provided by the party being investigated. The next step: a Carbon Footprint certification based on externally verified data.

We look forward to seeing what the future of standardisation of environmental impact will bring. Are you also interested in this topic? Contact us at info@certifeye.com, and we will be happy to think along with you.