SLB GROUP leads the way in food safety certification

After some of our welders, several engineers have now also acquired their HDN certification. This means they meet the strictest requirements pertaining to food safety. It also makes the SLB GROUP the first organisation in the Netherlands to have HDN-certified welders and engineers. By employing the same HDN requirements throughout our entire organisation, our clients can rest assured that we provide food-safe installations and machines in accordance with the highest quality standards.

The Hygienic Design Network (HDN) is a national platform of major producers, suppliers and leading organisations in the food industry. The SLB GROUP and its subsidiaries RVS NON FERRO and RIJKERS are also part of this platform. The participating parties share a common goal: to safeguard food safety, now and in the future. One of the platform’s key measures is to safeguard the European standards and guidelines for the design and manufacture of machinery and process installations in the food sector.

Stricter requirements for food-safe installations
Since 2016, the HDN offers courses to allow welders to earn their certification in accordance with stricter requirements. The member parties of the HDN platform all feel that the common NEN-EN-ISO 5817 standard is not strict enough to absolutely guarantee food safety. The platform therefore imposes additional welding requirements to supplement the European regulations, e.g. to avoid the occurrence of residual cleaning agents in an installation’s pipelines after it has been cleaned.

Successful certification process
SLB GROUP’s welding specialists are among the first people to earn this certification. It serves to demonstrate that our pipe welds meet the HDN standard and the additional requirements that come with it. Starting this year, the HDN will offer similar certification processes for designers and constructors. With the recent HDN certification of some of our engineers, we are taking the right steps to optimally safeguard food safety as early as the design stage. Our organisation is an industry leader in this regard.

Making global players even better

Our organisations operate at the heart of the Dutch agri-industrial and food industries. These are fields in which our country holds an international top position. Did you know, for example, that the Netherlands is the world’s second-largest exporter of agri-industrial and food products, or that we are the third-largest exporter of machinery for the food industry? Twenty percent of our country’s GDP is earned in the agri-industrial and food industries. At the SLB GROUP, we have a clear mission: to make innovative global players in these sectors even better.