“We have HACCP certification” gets said by nearly every frozen food supplier a buyer talks to. It’s true, and it’s also not very informative on its own — HACCP is a framework for identifying and controlling risk, not a fixed checklist, which means two HACCP-certified factories can have meaningfully different numbers of control points, different…
Most buyers think of the recipe as fixed by what the dish is supposed to be. A siu mai has pork in it because that’s what siu mai is. A dumpling filling is whatever the traditional ratio calls for. That’s true right up until you’re trying to get a product into the U.S. market —…
Most buyers assume there is one federal agency standing between them and their frozen dim sum shipment. There isn’t. Depending on what’s inside the wrapper, your product could fall under USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), or under the FDA. The two agencies run different systems, ask for different paperwork, and inspect shipments in…