Bord Bia is developing a new quality assurance standard which will merge existing producer standards, such as the Sustainable Beef and Lamb Assurance Scheme, into one consolidated standard.

The standard will be updated on a four-year cycle basis, a spokesperson for Bord Bia confirmed.

“The rationale for this new approach is to improve the efficiency of the standard development process in Bord Bia, with benefits to include the avoidance of reviewing the same criteria across multiple individual standards, more consistent auditing, less overall time required in the updating of standards, enhanced cross species reporting, and improved benchmarking against international standards.”

A technical advisory committee for this new standard is anticipated to convene in the first quarter of 2023, with an ambition to launch the standard in early 2024.

Speaking at last week’s Department of Agriculture Food Vision 2030 event, interim CEO Michael Murphy said there are 55,000 farmers in the quality assurance schemes and these schemes are licences to supply customers outside of Ireland.

“We’re now in the process of moving to one primary producer standard. Most of the work is developed on that standard. We’ll go into consultation next year and then we hope to launch that single farm standard that covers all enterprises on a farm. I believe that’s going to contribute to our work on the Climate Action Plan in terms of having a carbon footprint per farm.”