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Codex Alimentarius

The Codex Alimentarius is a collection of international food standards, guidelines and codes of practice published jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, and nothing in it is binding on anybody: its authority comes from national regulators adopting it and from the WTO referencing it in trade disputes.

What it is
Framework
Published by
FAO and WHO
GFSI recognised
Not applicable
When it started
Commission established in 1963
Where it is used
Around 190 member countries; the reference point for the WTO

What Codex Alimentarius is

The Codex Alimentarius Commission was established in 1963 by FAO and WHO. It publishes standards, codes of practice, guidelines and maximum residue limits covering food hygiene, additives, contaminants, labelling, methods of analysis and commodity standards.

Its best known output is the General Principles of Food Hygiene, whose annex sets out the HACCP system and the seven principles every certification scheme now builds on. A quality manager who has never read Codex has almost certainly worked to it second-hand.

Codex texts are voluntary. They become binding where a national government adopts them into its own law, and they carry weight in international trade because the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures references Codex standards as the benchmark against which a country's measures are judged.

Everything Codex publishes is free to read and download, which is unusual for a standards body and is a deliberate part of its remit.

What the Commission actually publishes

The Codex Alimentarius Commission was established in 1963 by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, and the Codex Alimentarius is the collection of texts it adopts. It is not one document. It contains commodity standards for individual foods, codes of practice describing how a category of food should be produced and handled, guidelines, and a large body of quantitative limits.

The quantitative texts are the ones with the most direct commercial effect: maximum residue limits for pesticides and veterinary drugs, maximum levels for contaminants, and the food additive provisions in the General Standard for Food Additives. A consignment rejected at a border for a residue is usually being measured against a national limit that was set from a Codex one.

The General Principles of Food Hygiene is the text the rest of this site connects to most often. It is where the HACCP principles are annexed, and it is the ancestor of the hygiene requirements in every certification scheme in this list.

Voluntary, and binding in practice

Codex texts are not law and the Commission has no enforcement power. Members adopt them into national regulation, or do not.

They are binding at one remove through trade law. The World Trade Organization Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures names Codex as the reference for food safety, which means a national measure aligned with a Codex standard is presumed consistent with the agreement, while a stricter national measure has to be justified by a risk assessment. That is why an apparently voluntary standard set by two United Nations agencies determines what a shipment is tested against.

The practical consequence for a manufacturer is that Codex is the common denominator between export markets. Where national rules diverge, the Codex limit is frequently the one that explains why they diverge in the direction they do.

The texts a food safety plan leans on

A plan written to any of the certification schemes on this site is standing on Codex whether or not it cites it. The hazard analysis method is the Codex one. The prerequisite programme categories, cleaning, pest control, personnel hygiene, maintenance, come from the General Principles of Food Hygiene. The distinction between a critical control point and a prerequisite programme is a Codex distinction.

This is the reason HACCP has no owner to certify against and Codex sells nothing. It is a normative body funded by its members, publishing texts freely, and its influence is exercised through adoption rather than through licensing.

Certification, and why it may not apply

There is no certification against Codex texts. The Commission is a standards body and does not operate a certification programme.

Where a Codex text matters to a certified site, it usually matters through the scheme: a scheme clause requires something that Codex specifies, or a national regulation adopting Codex applies directly.

GFSI recognition

Codex Alimentarius is not a certification programme, so GFSI recognition does not apply. The HACCP annex to its General Principles of Food Hygiene underlies every recognised scheme.

GFSI does not certify anybody and there is no GFSI certificate. What GFSI recognition actually means.

Where this meets United States regulation

A site selling into the United States is held to 21 CFR whether or not it holds a certification. These are the parts that bear on Codex Alimentarius, reproduced in full on this site because title 21 is United States public domain.

What goes wrong in practice

Certification is a statement about a system on the day it was audited. FDA recall records are what happened afterwards, across the whole industry, and these are the hazards that appear most often in the records a plan built to Codex Alimentarius is meant to control.

What Krolda does with Codex Alimentarius

Codex publishes everything free. Krolda treats Codex as reference rather than as a clause tree to map documents against, because a site is not audited against Codex directly.

Questions

What is the Codex Alimentarius?
The Codex Alimentarius is a collection of international food standards, guidelines and codes of practice published jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization through the Codex Alimentarius Commission, established in 1963. It covers food hygiene, additives, contaminants, labelling, methods of analysis and commodity standards.
Is Codex Alimentarius legally binding?
No. Codex texts are voluntary. They become binding where a national government adopts them into its own law, and they carry weight in international trade because the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures references Codex standards as the benchmark against which a country's food safety measures are assessed.
Where does HACCP come from?
HACCP as a formal system comes from the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets it out in an annex to the General Principles of Food Hygiene. Every food safety certification scheme in current use is built on the seven principles defined there, and several national regulations, including 21 CFR parts 120 and 123 in the United States, require HACCP by name.

The other standards

Whatever a site is held to, the audit asks for the evidence behind each clause, and finding it is the work. Krolda maps supplier documents to the clause they satisfy in FSSC 22000, IFS Food and 21 CFR 117, and routes the corrective action when the evidence is missing.

Early access

Recall records come from the openFDA food enforcement API, published by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the public domain. Krolda adds the hazard classification and the clause mapping; neither is an FDA determination. Always check the FDA notice before acting on a recall.