Food Safety

New legislation and consumer concern regarding food safety and quality are both exerting an increasing influence in the manufacture and retailing of food and drink products. Leatherhead helps our clients respond to these pressures, providing a comprehensive portfolio of food safety products and services to help them achieve the highest possible standards.

Our approach is very much ‘farm to fork' - working to improve food safety throughout the food chain, ensuring end-product food safety for consumers and working with primary producers to minimise potential safety risks. Leatherhead's Food Safety Research team conducts ongoing research covering areas including extending the shelf life of foods, detection of food poisoning organisms, improving gut health, and measuring the quality and authenticity of foods.

Key focus areas include:

Our clients receive the assurance that we can keep them at the cutting edge of food safety. Leatherhead works in close partnership with a number of leading technology providers and plays an active role in the development and evaluation of innovative technologies for the assessment of the safety and quality of foods.

UKAS

Leatherhead Food Research (Leatherhead) is an accredited testing laboratory under the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) scheme. UKAS is the sole national accreditation body recognised by government to assess, against internationally agreed standards, organisations that provide certification, testing, inspections and calibration services. Accreditation by UKAS demonstrates the competence, impartiality and performance capability of these evaluators. UKAS is a non-profit-distributing private company, limited by guarantee, and operates under a Memorandum of Understanding with the Government through the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills

The certificate that Leatherhead head office holds (Number 1152) accredits us to the standards of ISO/IEC 17025:2005 - General Requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories. Leatherhead has been UKAS accredited since 16 Dec 1992 and undergoes an annual audit in accordance with the UKAS scheme. Our accreditation allows us to carry out various analytical methods as provided for in our approved schedule. Broadly speaking the schedule covers us for tests covering chemical and microbiological tests of dairy products, cereals, fruit and vegetables, grains and nuts (for full details of our approved range of tests see http://www.ukas.org).

Leatherhead continually strives to attain the highest possible standards of quality and service for our customers. To that effect we have a very active internal audit schedule that works in conjunction with our voluntary independent external quality schemes - Food Analysis Performance Assessment Scheme (FAPAS) which is run by the Central Science Laboratory for chemical analysis and LGC Standards Proficiency Testing for Microbiological analysis.

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