The Canadian Herb, Spice and Natural Health Products Coalition has picked up a technical “letter of completion” for its on-farm food safety program, allowing farmer training to begin.
The letter comes from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which presented it to the coalition during the Natural Health Products Research Society conference last week in Toronto.
The coalition said its Good Agriculture and Collection Practices (GACP) program is thus confirmed as “technically sound” and following the principles of the hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) food safety system.
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GACP covers medicinal and culinary herbs (both cultivated and wildharvested), spice crops, hemp, wild crops (mushrooms, fiddleheads) and natural health products. The program’s scope runs from plant identification, production and harvest through post-harvest handling, the coalition said, focusing on “identity, safety, quality and traceability.”
“Through a wide range of pilot projects, the GACP program has proven to be user-friendly (and) flexible and can be customized to meet a wide range of producer/wildharvested operations,” the coalition wrote. For example, it said, the Ontario Ginseng Growers Association and others plan to use GACP as a standard base for its growers.
The next step, the coalition said, will be “working with various industry organizations across Canada to offer training to the several hundred growers and wildharvesters interested in enrolling in the voluntary GACP program.”
“For this industry, regardless of whether the ingredient ends up as a food, a medicine or a cosmetic, the identity and purity of raw botanicals is a priority,” coalition executive director Connie Kehler said in a release.
“What makes our program unique is the inclusion of a comprehensive practice, the first of its kind in the world, that helps guide growers and collectors in properly identifying their raw material,” said Kehler, who works out of Belle Plaine, Sask.
Among the program’s strengths, she said, “is the unique opportunity of linking the whole chain from field to shelf, from production through to finished product, for food and natural health products.”
