Quality Assurance
 At Master's Touch®, our
commitment is to ensure that our fruits and vegetables meet the highest food safety and
quality control standards in the world. Bionova Produce Inc./ Master's Touch® has
implemented quality control practices in fields and in packing plants where fruits and
vegetables must be handled carefully and efficiently to ensure food safety.
1) Good Agricultural Practices/EPA requirements.
The Bionova Produce Food Safety program for growing fields covers our customers' concerns
about food safety. We have a program to ensure that all of our growers use Good
Agricultural Practices (GAP´s) from seeding to picking. We have a pesticide safety
program that assures all our growers comply with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
requirements in order to provide you with products that have very low pesticide residue
levels and -- whenever possible --with non-detected pesticide residues. This program
assures that all our growers comply with the EPA tolerances for products exported to the
U.S. and with the tolerances to export to other countries including Canada, the UK, and
Japan.
NUTRICLEAN® Certification.
The NutriClean® program assures that some selected Master's Touch® commodities contain
no detected pesticide residue levels. All our products are sampled, analyzed and certified
by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS), an internationally recognized third-party
evaluation and certification program. All of our growers are working with SCS on food
safety certification of GAP´s to improve their operations during production and
harvesting to bring you the safest produce on the market.
For more information about SCS, see the SCS
Fact Sheet, visit their web site or contact: Sydney Brown, (510) 832-1415. Along with
NutriClean® certification through SCS, Bionova Produce Inc. is the first grower/shipper
in Mexico to offer both NutriClean®
certified table grapes and to achieve the CertiClean food safety management
certifications of its operations. Bionova Produce/Master's Touch® grapes are exported to
the U.S. and Europe.
2) Operations/ Good Manufacturing Practices.
Bionova Produce Inc. requires its growers to initiate a certification program that uses
Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP's) on their operations, including: improving facilities,
training workers, cleaning and disinfection procedures, risk analysis and maintaining
documentation.
a) Training
All our personnel -- from supervisors to field workers -- are trained every season on food
safety issues. The training includes the importance of washing hands and the prevention of
contamination. Every season our growers receive training on proper management, and are
kept up to date on registered products, tolerances and safe pesticide levels for each
product. We're developing a culture among our growers to keep the use of chemicals on
fields to a minimum, with a long-term objective to grow the highest quality products that
are completely free of pesticide residues.
b) Facilities
Our fields are equipped with all the critical hygiene equipment that will assure our
operations are safe and comply with U.S. regulations. We have toilets for our workers and
hand wash stations. We sanitize all our harvest equipment daily. Also we sample our
irrigation wells for potable water. Controlled packing techniques include careful hand
inspection by trained quality assurance experts (who manage a daily system-wide quality
report), and sanitation procedures. We're improving our packing facilities to sort and
pack our products with the latest technology and the safest hygiene conditions for our
products and our workers. All our facilities are audited and in the process of being
certified to comply with a food safety management program by Scientific Certification
Systems.
DISINFECTION
All our products pass through a disinfection process in our packing facilities. The levels
of disinfectants are monitored during working hours, and records are kept for any
deviation. We test our water for potable standards during the season to assure we´re
using the best quality water.
c) Shipping
Bionova Produce Inc./ Master's Touch® fruits and vegetables are distributed quickly once
they are packed in temperature controlled trucks. The products are sampled and tested for
quality at every stage. Convenient distribution points in Nogales and San Diego are key
quality checkpoints where trained personnel evaluate fruits and vegetables for color,
temperature, freshness and appearance. |
