It has been a true pleasure watching our ProStar team interact with the SQF auditor here in Pottstown, PA, this week. For those of you who are reading this and are not familiar with SQF, it’s a very high level certification from the Safety and Quality Institute that shows a serious commitment to transparency in food production – or in our case — food and other goods secondary packaging.

Nancy Grove from Eagle Food Certifications, Inc. has been onsite for the last two days to review our operating procedures, inspect our facility, and test all our team members on their processes and procedures.  Nancy has been thorough and tough, but also very approachable, knowledgeable and professional. Her assessments have ranged from a timed inventory traceability test of a random lot code in Nulogy’s PackManager system, to a focused review of our shipping and receiving operations in real time.  

One of the coolest things I observed this week is watching Kim Salvatore, our Quality Assurance Director, confidently respond to “show me objective evidence of following procedures” in over 500 certification elements over the last 12 months.  John Shollenberger, Prostar Operations Manager, and his team have also stepped up and interacted in a very professional way, showing they care about what they do and how they do it. Many other team members including Lydia, Gladys, Mike, Chris, Henry and John R., have all made me very proud.

Some would argue that achieving and maintaining SQF certification in secondary packaging is overkill.  Indeed, there are very few SQF certified secondary co-packagers in the US, and we must maintain a lot of documentation for SQF – while still retaining our agility and intense focus on customer service.  But having this certification shows we are disciplined operationally and care about doing things the right way, every single day.

Julian Bossong
CEO