Westminster, CO -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/15/2010 -- The SIDI Working Group is a cooperative effort run by the dietary supplement industry trade associations including the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA), the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA), the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), the Natural Products Association (NPA), and the United Natural Products Alliance (UNPA).
According to Robert Hudson of TraceGains, “Certificates of Analysis are a vital part of every food manufacturer, processor, and distribution business—however they take time to review and approve; time that costs money and could be more productively spent. Supplier Compliance from TraceGains makes sure that organizations only need to pay attention to CoAs that require actual human eyeballs. The system can automatically reject non-compliant ingredients before they enter processing or manufacturing, and automatically accept conforming shipments that meet your own business rules and internal test results.”
The Joint Standardized Information on Dietary Supplement Ingredients (SIDI) Working Group—a coalition of the dietary supplement industry’s trade associations—today announced the release of the new Certificate of Analysis (CoA) Guideline, the latest in a series of voluntary guidelines for the supplement industry developed to assist finished product manufacturers with the complex process of qualifying their ingredient suppliers.
The voluntary CoA Guideline outlines the type and scope of information that should appear on a CoA provided by an ingredient supplier to its finished product manufacturer for a component or ingredient used in a dietary supplement.
“A requirement of the supplier qualification process involves verifying the information provided in an ingredient CoA, and manufacturers of dietary supplements rely on supplier CoAs to ensure finished products are GMP-compliant. It’s essential for ingredient suppliers to have a form that can be consistently used, containing the appropriate information in a clear and concise format,” said Andrew Shao, Ph.D., a spokesperson for the SIDI Working Group and CRN’s senior vice president, scientific & regulatory affairs. “By standardizing the information on CoAs, this voluntary guideline will benefit both ingredient suppliers and dietary supplement manufacturers.”
The voluntary CoA guideline, along with sample CoA templates for botanical and non-botanical ingredients, is available on the five trade associations’ websites, along with the original SIDI protocol materials.
The mission at TraceGains (http://www.TraceGains.com) is to make the food supply chain safer and more profitable by helping companies produce finished goods faster, better, and more cost-effectively. Supplier Compliance is a food safety firewall that allows companies to detect and eliminate problems in the supply chain before they are incorporated into finished goods and shipped to customers. By reducing ingredient variability, the finished product becomes less costly to manufacture, performs better, and ultimately increases customer satisfaction. Supplier Impact enables companies to easily measure how each supplier affects finished goods quality and profitability, and connects product outcomes and customer feedback to specific upstream ingredient suppliers.
Suppliers are continuously scored based on performance of key attributes for each shipment, and rank ordered against their peers. With the TraceGains’ CaseTrace and LabelTrace solutions, companies can achieve true ingredient-level traceability. Effective product recalls are accelerated and performed at the unit level, so recall costs, long-term brand damage, and brand rehabilitation costs are minimized. LabelTrace can be expanded to include brand authentication and consumer-level loyalty marketing. All TraceGains solutions present findings in easy-to-understand dashboard graphics with full drilldown capabilities, which are available for onsite deployment or delivered as SaaS (software-as-a-service). Headquartered in Longmont, Colorado, USA, TraceGains has direct and partner offices throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
TraceGains Inc.
http://www.tracegains.com
Marc Simony, Director of Marketing
traceability@tracegains.com
(303)682-9898