A box is a box is a box, right? Wrong. Especially if you’re a supplier of consumer food packaging and your customers demand the best in food safety. That’s exactly the discussion Atlantic sales representative Mike Dzus had with customer Grant Ferguson of Chantler Packaging. Ferguson was explaining to Dzus how major retailers were constantly raising the bar on the quality of the packaging for their wares. What followed was a case study about how supply chain partners can work together for mutual benefit and superior product quality.
Chantler, a seventy-five-year-old family business based in Mississauga, supplies flexible packaging for consumer packaged goods such as breads, fruits and vegetables. Starting with the calls from global retailers such as Walmart to package goods in more responsible ways, pressure has mounted all the way down the supply chain to respond. For Atlantic, that meant attaining the PACsecure/HACCP Food Safety Certification, only the third company in Canada to do so as of February 2010. PACsecure is a Canadian-authored set of food safety protocols for packaging converters intended to harmonize with the international protocol long used by the global food and beverage industry: Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP). For more information, click here.
“Chantler operates under HACCP guidelines and Atlantic has PACsecure/HACCP, so Grant just connected the dots and decided there was great value in communicating that to Chantler’s customers,” remembers Dzus. Within six months of coming up with the idea,
Grant Ferguson, Chantler Packaging and Mike Dzus, Atlantic Packaging with PACsecure certified boxes
Atlantic began to produce boxes for Chantler that proudly displayed the PACsecure logo. Says Dzus, “With food safety concerns so high right now, this logo adds a lot of value for our customers. It’s the payback on getting the certification since Atlantic is practically alone in this space.”
From his perspective, Ferguson sees the HACCP and PACsecure certifications as extra levels of quality that differentiate his company’s products from the competition. “While HACCP does not require our corrugated secondary packaging to be certified food safe, the spirit of the certification is to take extra care with any item that is coming into close contact with food. So, Atlantic’s efforts allow us to give our end customer an extra level of confidence in our products and another reason to keep their business with Chantler.” According to Ferguson, Chantler has been working toward attaining the ISO 2200 certification this fall, which combines food safety and packaging printing/manufacturing protocols.
Dzus says his team is standardizing their approach to using the PACsecure and other certifications such as FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) in their sales process. “We’re not just providing boxes. We’re delivering on a promise to the end consumer and that starts right at the beginning of the supply chain.”
