Kiwa Stories - Articles

The BRCGS Global Standard Food Safety is one of the world’s leading food safety standards, and has been adopted by over 24,000 sites across nearly 140 countries. To learn more about this popular standard, we spoke to Arne Leclercq, Certification Manager Food Safety & Teamlead at Vinçotte, a Kiwa company. He answers some of the key questions, including what BRCGS is, how to get certified, how long it takes, what drives the cost, and more.

Yara Suomi, a supplier of fertilizers and environmental solutions, wanted to assess the condition of a concrete chimney at its sulfuric acid plant in Siilinjärvi. Using traditional methods, the inspection would have been a demanding task, requiring extensive scaffolding to be erected around the tall chimney. However, there was also an alternative: a new inspection method that would eliminate the need to work at height altogether.

Global Ethics Day, founded by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and now in its 13th year, invites organizations to reflect on the values and principles that shape how decisions get made. This year it falls on 21 October, with the theme “Re-centering Ethics.” For a testing, inspection, certification and consultancy company like Kiwa, impartiality is essential, and that puts ethics at the center of our work.

Discover the focus of Safety Week 2026, running from 5 to 9 October. This year, we introduce the Energy Wheel as a practical prompt to help colleagues recognize energy sources before work starts, especially during the Last-Minute Risk Assessment.

EEW Energy fromWaste Delfzijl B.V. recovers energy and raw materials from waste streams and was recently certified by Kiwa at Level 1 of the CO2 Performance Ladder version 4.0. This means that EEW has demonstrated that its CO2 management system meets the strengthened requirements of the updated Handbook 4.0 of the CO2 Performance Ladder. With this certification, EEW underlines its ambition to structurally monitor, achieve and safeguard its sustainability goals.

Hydrogen storage systems must perform safely and reliably under demanding operating conditions. Comprehensive testing plays a key role in verifying their durability, performance and compliance before they enter the market. To meet this demand, Kiwa ET has expanded its hydrogen testing infrastructure and can now perform standardized testing on hydrogen pressure tanks with volumes of up to 600 litres.

Medical device manufacturers operate in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. While compliance requirements such as the Medical Device Regulation (MDR) apply across the industry, the path to certification is rarely the same for every organization.

Sustainability plays an important role in the animal feed chain. For Denkavit, a global producer of young animal nutrition and feed ingredients, this is not a new development. The Dutch company has been working for many years on nutritional solutions that contribute to healthy animals and a future-proof livestock sector. By becoming the world's first animal feed organization to be certified by Kiwa according to the new GMP+ MI5.7 Feed Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) standard, Denkavit is taking the next step in making the environmental impact of its products and processes transparent and demonstrable.

In recent years, NIS2 has mainly been about awareness, impact analyses and preparations. The phase has now begun in which organizations must not only make plans, but above all demonstrate that they’re actually implementing them. The question is no longer: ‘Do we need to do something with NIS2?’ but: ‘Can we demonstrate that we are managing our cyber risks?’.

Artificial intelligence is developing at a rapid pace. More and more organizations are using AI to automate processes, perform analyses or support decision-making. At the same time, the need to control the risks associated with AI is increasing. How do you ensure that AI is applied reliably, transparently and responsibly? And how do you demonstrate that your organization uses AI in a controlled manner?

The implementation of the European Union’s (EU) recast Drinking Water Directive (DWD) on 1 January 2027 marks important changes for manufacturers in the drinking water sector. Any new products you place on the EU market as a manufacturer will have to comply with new requirements. And while the Directive does not explicitly address pre-products, they are in many cases the best place to start. In this article, we explain why, while also discussing how your company can prepare for the changes ahead.

The question your organization needs to ask isn't whether it will face a cyber-attack, but when. That's why more and more companies are investing in information security and cyber resilience. That’s where two international standards come in: ISO 27001 for information security and ISO 22301 for business continuity. In this article, Henk-Willem Mutsaers, Lead Auditor at Kiwa, explains how the two standards reinforce each other and why combining them can help you build broader organizational resilience than either one on its own.

If your company wants to reduce its environmental footprint, raise efficiency levels, and show customers, partners, and other stakeholders that you are responsible and compliant, working toward ISO 14001 is a great step. And with the recently published revision, ISO 14001:2026, it's the perfect time to engage with this popular environmental management system (EMS). Adopting any EMS or standard in your company can be a challenging task, and it's no different with ISO 14001:2026. To help answer your questions, we spoke to Richard Walsh, Principal Assessor for Environment and Energy at NQA, a Kiwa company, about ISO 14001.

Learn more about the ISO 14001:2026 updates, transition deadlines, and environmental management best practices to strengthen sustainability and compliance.

If your organization is aiming to improve its environmental performance and demonstrate compliance with today's sustainability expectations, which standard should you be working towards, ISO 9001 or ISO 14001? We put that question to expert Richard Walsh, Principal Assessor for Environment and Energy at NQA, a Kiwa company, who explains the difference between the two, and where a third standard, ISO 45001, fits in as well.