Quality policy 2023

Since over 85 years, ESPERSEN is trusted for its safe Fish & Seafood products of high quality to consumers in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

At ESPERSEN we collaborate with our strategic customers and suppliers as partners as we believe in long-term, open and honest relationships.

We engage all employees under the umbrella of our “One ESPERSEN Culture” supporting our values of:

• Meeting our customer’s expectations
• A lively Quality & Food safety culture and certified Q&FS Systems
• An open and honest communication
• Caring about our employees
• Building sustainability into our business operations from raw materials to finished goods

We are committed to meet our customers’ expectations for superior quality and safe products that comply with legal requirements at all times. Our procedures, processes, standards, systems and planned actions are centrally managed in a Q&FS systems platform to ensure that we follow the same ways of working in all production sites.

We believe in continuous improvement of our people, processes and technologies with people development programs, team-work across departments and 3rd party assessments of our Q&FS Culture plans.

• All our European and Asian production sites are 3rd party certified against audit standards recognized by the Global Food Safety Initiative (e.g. BRC and/or IFS).
• We have the systems in place to produce products certified against traceability and ethical standards (e.g. MSC, ASC, RSPO or SMETA).
• We have implemented SBTi to be able to calculate our CO2 emissions.

Furthermore we ensure certification against explicit customer standards, and we welcome our customers to audit our facilities against their specific Quality and Food Safety Management requirements.

We stay abreast of leading edge developments and invest in innovative equipment to minimize defects and complaints to the lowest possible level.

We are prepared to react quickly should there occur any non-conformity. Our food safety approach is risk-based and covers the entire chain from raw materials to the finished goods. We follow a preventative HACCP program including allergen, food fraud/adulteration, authenticity & integrity management and we regularly validate and monitor its effectiveness.

All products are tested in our internal and/or accredited external laboratories – following the same methods and procedures no matter where they are produced.

In ESPERSEN “we say what we do and we do what we say”

We investigate every complaint to make sure we understand the root cause and can avoid the same non-conformity from happening again. We have traceability programs, from which we are able to trace each production lot down - and upwards to all finished products, raw materials/ingredients and packaging materials. We regularly perform internal and external exercises to challenge our system.