What Is Organic Certified?

Here at Mighty Brew, we are extremely passionate and proud that all our drinks are Soil Association Organic Certified. You’ll often see plenty of claims about sustainability and welfare, but amongst them the organic logo stands out as the only one underpinned by law. The Soil Association is the UK’s largest and oldest organic certification body.

Soil Association certified products must legally comply with not only the EU Organic Regulation but also meet the higher Soil Association standards. The Soil Association wants to ensure the highest possible standards of animal welfare, environmental and wildlife protection, so they have their own higher – or stricter – standards in key areas. This is because they want to drive change.

How Certification Works

For a food product to be labelled as organic, every organisation working up and down its supply chain – from farmers, to packers, to food processors, and organic retailers – must meet organic standards and prove it to an organic certification body.

All organic farms and food companies are thoroughly inspected at least once a year. They also need robust systems in place and paperwork that shows the standards are being met the rest of the time.

Once organic farms and food companies are certified as meeting strict organic standards, they are issued with a certificate and a trading schedule. This lists all the crops, livestock or products they are certified to trade as organic. This certificate acts like a passport and is necessary to prove the organic status of the goods when they are sold on.

When products are imported from countries outside of the EU, they not only have to be accompanied by an organic certificate, but they also need a Certificate of Import. This verifies the product is produced to organic standards equivalent to those in the EU.

To ensure that organic certification is carried out consistently, the inspectors themselves are inspected every year. Checks are made by accreditation bodies such as UKAS and UK certification bodies are required to regularly report to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

This might sound like a rather complex and bureaucratic process. However, it’s designed to ensure
that organic food is food you can trust whether you’re buying vegetables directly from a farmer with a small holding or supermarket spices where ingredients may have come from the other side of the world.

To find out more visit the Soil Association website https://www.soilassociation.org

You can also go to our Mighty Brew online shop if you’d like to enjoy a delicious Soil Association Organic Certified kombucha!

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