Well, after 3 hours of inspection as we do every six months, Place des Epices has once again received a favorable opinion from our certifier Ecocert. They give us a special mention for the quality of our traceability, which is something we're very proud of, since it's been one of our credos since the company was founded.
I often hear allegations that controls are non-existent or even "bought in"; I can assure you that this is absolutely false. When you process and/or import, your production chain is strictly controlled to avoid any cross-contamination between your organic products and your so-called conventional products (for us, it's very simple, only a few peppers don't have the label and are stored in a very specific area of the lab).
When you are exporting - i.e. outside the EU (which is our case) - you must have a CERtificat d'EXportation - CERTEX - which will only be issued once sanitary and customs/fraud controls have been carried out by the DDPP; which is of course our case, since we ship our spice blends not only to Europe, but also to Africa.
Once a year, an unannounced inspection is carried out, enabling the certifier to check that everything is in order, that there is no cross-fertilization and that unauthorized products are not circulating.
The annual inspection in June is a major check on stock levels (and, of course, on the rules to be observed when you're working under an organic label). For each reference, you must produce your purchase invoices, your sales and your stock. The weight of stock + sales must be equal to that of purchases. On paper it's pretty straightforward, but in reality it's quite a different matter!
Let's take the case of organic pepper or, better still, turmeric; let's imagine you buy 1kg of whole organic turmeric, so you must have 1kg less turmeric in stock, yes, but turmeric is used in dozens of blends and in varying proportions 😉 So you must be able to say (and quickly): I sold 4 spice blends A with 7% turmeric, 12 spice blends B with 18% turmeric and 5 bags of 100% organic turmeric ... so I'll leave you to imagine the gasworks to set up... in the event of irregularity on the stock/sales/purchase differences it's a penalty.
The only "problem" we've encountered to date is a problem of space on labels. In fact, the organic agency, the certifying bodies and the DDPP (Direction Départementale de la Protection des Populations) require that all the ingredients in a mixture be listed on the product packaging. When your name is Ducros, McCormick or Foodservice, this is no problem: your ras-el-hanout contains 9 spices at best (including garlic, ginger and paprika!), but when you make an organic ras-el-hanout containing 20 or even 50 spices (the good ones this time), it's a different story. To be honest, we don't yet know how to solve this problem. Should we reduce the font size and become illegible, no; increase the size of the labels, impossible... I'm happy to take any suggestions, but it seems that the problem has recently been solved... to be continued.
