Product Excellence Certificate Presented in Zagreb

The Food and Beverage Laboratory (LHiP) today officially presented the product excellence certificate in Zagreb, the first Croatian label intended exclusively for food products that have been laboratory proven to be of high quality.

Behind this label lies a series of exact indicators: microbiological, chemical, and sensory characteristics of food, which, along with the assessment of packaging suitability, form a unique whole of the product. The Food and Beverage Laboratory gathered the most important and expert individuals from the academic community, namely experts from the Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology, the Croatian Society of Food Technologists, the Croatian Veterinary Institute, the Croatian Institute of Public Health, and other state bodies responsible for public health. Dean of the Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology, Damir Ježek, emphasized that research conducted by the GFK agency showed that only one in four respondents believes they can assess the quality of a food product by reading the label, and only one-fifth of them fully trusts the accuracy of the information on the label.

– With this project, we want to encourage the currently largest processing industry, the food industry, to process food products as qualitatively as possible, but also to send a message to retailers that quality products must be given a place on the shelf – said Damir Ježek. In Croatia, there are no similar quality labels, although there are other labels that evaluate food products, but there is a significant difference in their evaluation. Namely, existing labels are not quality labels since these certificates are awarded based on consumer survey results, not on the basis of laboratory research results. For this reason, LHiP operates on an agency-type model, which means that in the evaluation of a particular product, samples will be taken from store shelves, not from industrial plants, precisely to ensure that the analysis is conducted on a sample that any customer can purchase. (S. M.)