The process of achieving ISO accreditation includes passing a comprehensive assessment and review of the lab’s quality management system and competence to perform specific tests. It’s a task-based approach, and not a review of overall operations, as a GMP audit might be.
NOW announced today that it has received ISO/IEC 17025:2017 accreditation from the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) for its analytical and microbial laboratories for several ‘scopes,’ of operation, including arsenic speciation in raw materials and finished products by HPLC-ICP-MS; determination of acid value by titration; determination of peroxide value by FoodLabFat; metal and mineral testing by ICP-MS (arsenic, cadmium, iodine, lead and mercury); and multi-pesticide residue analysis by GC-MS/MS for 195 pesticides.
What do the ISO ‘scopes’ imply?
Aaron Secrist, Executive Vice President of Quality, R&D and Operations, NOW Health Group, said his company chose those scopes because they represent some of the most complicated tests the company routinely performs. Other scopes are planned to be added in the future, but starting at the top, so to speak, could serve as an indicator of an overall high level of overall competence, he said.
Sadly, some other labs seem to go about it the other wary around, certifying a more simple test or two and then holding that up as a statement of operational quality.
“I can’t speak to the intentions of every lab out there but there are enough labs advertising themselves as ISO 17025 labs with a very simple and narrow scope of accreditation that I have to think it is calculated. Many companies that are looking for contract labs will ask the question, ‘Are you ISO/IEC 17025 certified?’ without asking the right follow up question which should be, ‘What is the scope of your accreditation?’ I think that contract labs have been getting asked the first question for a long time without being asked the second so a lack of robust contract lab qualification process has likely contributed to this issue,” Secrist told NutraIngredients-USA.