8 Aug 2009 : Coffee Plant in Macau passed the tri-certification challenge

SIM is short name of Sociedade Industrial de Macau, Lda. which has an advanced coffee manufacturing plant in Macau. Coffee products are sold mainly to PRC, but of course would also cover Hong Kong, Macau and nearby markets. Most of their materials are imported from worldwide sources, e.g. Brazil, Portugal, Vietnam, etc. The plant was manufactured in Germany and is a highly automatic and computerized facility. SIM occupies the whole factory building which was newly built and located at the Macau border next to Zhuhai, PRC. In Nov. 2008, when their production has reached a steady state, they started a project to set up the management system in accordance with ISO9001:2008 (Quality), ISO 22000:2005 (Food Safety) and HACCP (Food Safety) for their manufacturing process. The brand of the coffee product is Ola’ cafe’, and has been classified as ‘Gourmet’, ‘Aromatic’ and ‘Pleasure’. As product lines are developing rapidly, it is expected that other coffee products will be pushed out to the Market very soon. As a start, consultants of N. Law and Associates helped to set up a Food Safety Team, headed by a Leader who is experienced in ISO and GMP. A series of training has been conducted to all levels of staff in order to provide staff with the knowledge of Quality Management System and Food Safety Management System. Six months was the time given by Management to the Food Safety Team and the Consultants. Because they were going for 3 Certificates, this amount of time was highly insufficient. However, every body was very committed to the success of the project and they all work hard, even at times working up to mid night. Eventually, SGS was chosen as the Certification Body and SIM has successfully gone passed the audit confirming the compliance to the 3 standards in May 2009.