Post 21. What is a product specification?

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What is a product specification?

A specification is quite simply a document that defines specific characteristics or requirements of an ingredient (ingredient specification), packaging (packaging specification), or product specification. 

Characteristics are distinguishing features which are inherent or assigned, quantitative or qualitative. [1] Characteristics can be physical (chemical, biological); sensory (organoleptic - smell, taste, visual, auditory); behavioural (integrity, honesty); temporal (reliability); or functional (preservative, flavour, colour, etc.) [1]

The defining of product characteristics is then associated with the testing or assessment programme that can determine whether the ingredient or product meets those characteristics or criteria.

Chemical characteristics could relate to nutritional standards e.g. levels of carbohydrate, or sugars, protein, vitamin levels, fibre levels etc. Chemical characteristics can also include amount of preservative, artificial sweetener and so on.

What is quality?

ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Systems: fundamentals and vocabulary defines quality as ‘the degree to which a set of inherent [innate] characteristics of an object [in this case food] fulfils requirements’, that is conforms [meets] with a given specification or set of criteria. [2]

or simply does the material or product comply with the requirements of the specification.

What is conformity?

Quite simply conformity means the item meets requirements and it can be assessed in a variety of ways:

• Inspection - assessment or testing of specific characteristics of an item (e.g. wheat that is going to be used to make flour to then make bread) to determine whether it conforms to the specified requirements e.g. protein levels. Inspection can take place at various points in a process - goods inwards, on-line, final inspection; 
• Monitoring - determining the status of the item at a given point in time i.e.undertaking assessment or testing to identify if the item is compliant or non-compliant at that moment. 
• Verification - activities to confirm there is evidence, either current or historic that a product or business meets specified requirements. This may be product testing e.g. shelf-life testing of a retained sample of a food to make sure it meets safety and quality requirements at the end of its shelf-life or assessment of evidence such as certificates of analysis that vouch the product meets specifications where the inspection has been done by others.

The status of a food product can be determined via online and real-time assessment, offline and real-time or delayed assessment or retrospective assessment of retained samples. Food supply chains often follow an assurance approach where verification of processes via assessment of documentation has replaced some product inspection activities. This means that rather than test the wheat for pesticide residues, certificates provided by the supplier or records of chemical application are checked instead. One of the reasons for this is that product testing can be costly and can also introduce time delays in food supply chains where product is being held until the results of the product testing have been received. The design and implementation of preventative food safety and quality assurance approaches has, where there is no evidence of non-conformity, provided confidence in the management systems used and has replaced control-based product testing. One challenge with product testing is determining how many samples need to be taken to ensure that the results are representative of the batch being tested. This means that often multiple kinds of evidence is drawn together to provide confidence that the product is consistently meeting the specification. 

Intrinsic and extrinsic standards

As well as intrinsic product-related quality attributes being defined in specifications as described in this post; specifications can also include extrinsic production or process-related attributes that relate to say organic standards, or sustainability related standards for how the wheat has been grown. [3] Specifications including the development of extrinsic criteria are considered in the next posts.

[1] ISO 9000:2015. Quality management systems – fundamentals and vocabulary. Available at: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:9000:ed-4:v1:en  

[2] https://www.iso.org/obp/ui

[3] https://shop.bdspublishing.com/store/bds/detail/product/3-190-9781801463423