Impartiality, conflict of interest and quality

Emet certifies; it does not consult. We never design, formulate, implement or maintain the products or processes we certify, and we never certify a product or facility for which we, our owners, or any related company have provided such services. Explaining our requirements and our findings is part of certification; building your compliance for you is not a service we offer, at any price.

Certification decisions are made solely on evidence of conformity. They are never influenced by fees, by ownership, by the size of a client, or by any other commercial interest. Anyone may raise a concern about our impartiality through our complaints process.

• Design, manufacture, install, distribute or maintain any product we certify.
• Provide consultancy to a client on how to obtain or keep certification from us — including recipe reformulation, sourcing a compliant supplier, or building a kosher programme.
• Certify a product or site where we, our owners, or a company under our control have acted in any of those roles.
• Market certification as linked to consultancy, or suggest that certification is quicker, simpler or cheaper if a particular adviser is used.
• Allow a person who advised a client to review or decide that client's certification, or to resolve a complaint or appeal about it, within two years.

Telling you which ingredient fails and what the requirement is, is not consultancy — it is the job. Deciding for you how to fix it is.

We identify risks to our impartiality on an ongoing basis — arising from our activities, our relationships, and the relationships of our people — and we record what we do about each one. Relationships that create a risk we cannot eliminate are declined rather than managed.

Everyone who can influence a certification decision, employed or contracted, declares conflicts before they touch a file. Where a declaration bites, that person is removed from the decision, not merely noted.

Our purpose is that a certificate carrying the Emet mark means what it says, on the day somebody checks it. Everything else follows from that:

• Decisions rest on evidence. Ingredient letters are verified against the producing plant and item code; findings are recorded; nothing is certified on assurance alone.
• The register is the truth. Certification status is published live and changes the same day it changes in fact. A printed certificate is evidence of nothing on its own, and we say so on every one.
• The people are separate. Whoever evaluates does not decide. Whoever decided does not resolve the appeal.
• Mistakes are corrected in public. Where we issue something in error we void it on the register and say so. Where a certified product is mislabelled we publish an alert.
• Records outlive opinions. The audit trail is append-only at the database level, and no member of staff can rewrite it.

Kosher requirements are determined by halacha under our rabbinic authority. Our certification process — application review, evaluation, independent decision, surveillance and a public register — is structured in accordance with ISO/IEC 17065:2012, the international standard for bodies certifying products, and operates as a Type 5 scheme as described in ISO/IEC 17067:2013.

Emet does not hold, and does not claim, accreditation to ISO/IEC 17065. No accreditation programme exists for kosher certification anywhere in the world. We reference the standard because it is the discipline we run to — not as a credential.