Pasta Montana Achieves Food Safety Certification

Pasta Montana http://www.pastamontana.com/ announced today that its Great Falls production facility has been certified to the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), British Retail Consortium (BRC) Global Standard, with an "A" rating.

GFSI is an internationally recognized standard of food safety and quality programs for food manufacturers. It also helps increase transparency and efficiency in the food supply chain.

Pasta Montana has been working tirelessly for several months with guidance from a team of quality specialists led by Todd Daniels from the Montana Manufacturing Extension Center http://www.mtmanufacturingcenter.com/ to be ready for the GFSI audit.

"We believe in having a superior food safety program with related quality systems in place, adhering to the most widely accepted and stringent standards. It will benefit us in many ways," said Randy Gilbertson, General Manager of Pasta Montana, which is owned by Nippon Flour Mills in Tokyo, Japan. GFSI will help eliminate a series of frequent but lesser audits the company has previously gone through.

The audit was performed by the American Institute of Baking (AIB), a recognized certifying body for GFSI-BRC standards. The audit reviewed all aspects of the company food safety and quality systems to see that they satisfy requirements of the standard.

"Pasta Montana is the first of Nippon affiliated companies to achieve the BRC certification," said Yasuhiko Harada, president of Pasta Montana. "Globally, food safety is an increasingly important public health concern. I am pleased to see the fine effort in this area."

"An A rating is the highest rating you can achieve," said Daniels of MMEC, "We assisted Pasta Montana in response to a customer requirement, accomplishing it in about a fourth of the time it normally takes."