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 the certification is suspended or withdrawn the same day, and the register tells anyone who asks.
• 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. That is what warrants the kashrut of anything we certify, and nothing else does.

Around that sits the machinery of a certification body: an application is reviewed, the evidence is evaluated, somebody who did not evaluate makes the decision, surveillance keeps it true, and a public register answers for it. We publish those rules so they can be held against us.

Emet holds no accreditation, and claims none. Kosher certification is not accredited the way management-system certification is, and we will not imply otherwise about ourselves. What can be judged is the rabbinic authority behind a certificate, the rules the body publishes, and whether its register tells the truth today — which is why all three are on this site.