World Food Day 2025: Building global trust in agrifood systems through accreditation

World Food Day 2025 is marked under the theme “Hand in Hand for Better Foods and a Better Future”. It’s a powerful reminder that transforming the way we grow, process, and distribute food requires international cooperation across borders, sectors, and generations. Yet this task is made even more urgent and complex by today’s realities: a shifting geopolitical landscape, fragile supply chains, and the far-reaching impacts of climate change on global food production.

Against this backdrop, trust becomes the cornerstone of progress. People, businesses, and governments must be confident that the food reaching tables is safe, nutritious, and produced to consistent standards of quality and sustainability. Accreditation — the independent recognition that organisations are competent to perform testing, inspection, and certification — provides this essential trust.

Accreditation from farm to fork

The agrifood chain is made up of multiple interdependent stages, each with its own risks and requirements. Accreditation provides assurance at every step, reducing risk and reinforcing confidence:

• On the farm: Laboratories accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 analyse soil quality, fertiliser residues, pesticide levels, and water safety. Accredited certification bodies working to ISO/IEC 17065 also assess animal welfare and biosecurity, providing reassurance to retailers and regulators. For example, accredited certification plays a central role in ensuring compliance with Red Tractor assurance schemes, which require robust verification of farming practices.
• Veterinary testing: Healthy animals are the foundation of a safe food supply. Accredited veterinary laboratories, operating to ISO/IEC 17025, carry out surveillance for notifiable diseases, screen for zoonotic pathogens such as Salmonella or avian influenza and monitor residues of veterinary medicines. Accreditation ensures these laboratories apply validated methods, maintain robust quality control, and produce results that regulators, farmers, and consumers can trust. By underpinning early detection of disease outbreaks and verifying animal health standards on farms, accredited veterinary testing not only protects animal welfare but also reduces risks to public health and strengthens confidence in the agrifood system as a whole.
• Processing and manufacturing: Accredited laboratories detect allergens (such as peanut or gluten traces) and contaminants like heavy metals or mycotoxins, protecting consumers from life-threatening risks. Certification bodies accredited to ISO/IEC 17065 check hygiene practices, equipment calibration, and compliance with hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) systems. They underpin schemes such as organic certification, Brand Reputation through Compliance Global Standards (BRCGS) and other product marks, demonstrating compliance with recognised standards of quality.
• Packaging and distribution: Accredited laboratories test packaging for food contact safety, ensuring no harmful chemicals migrate into food. Certification bodies assess cold-chain logistics to verify that perishable goods such as dairy, seafood, and fresh produce remain within safe storage conditions from depot to supermarket.
• Retail and consumer trust: Accredited testing validates nutritional labelling, verifies allergen declarations, and detects food fraud such as mislabelling of meat origin or substitution of olive oil with cheaper alternatives. These activities protect consumers while helping authorities and retailers maintain confidence in global supply chains.

Across this continuum, accreditation ensures that testing, inspection, and certification activities are impartial, competent, and benchmarked against internationally recognised standards — providing confidence in food “from farm to fork.”

Reducing barriers to trade: the role of MRAs

Food and agricultural products are among the most heavily traded commodities in the world. A single supply chain may see wheat grown in Eastern Europe, processed into flour in Asia, baked into products in the Middle East, and sold in supermarkets across Europe and Africa. With supply chains spanning dozens of jurisdictions, the potential for duplicated checks, conflicting requirements, and trade friction is immense.

This is where mutual recognition agreements (MRAs) come into play. Accreditation bodies such as UKAS are signatories to international arrangements overseen by the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC) and the International Accreditation Forum (IAF). These arrangements mean that a test report or certificate issued by an organisation accredited by UKAS to ISO/IEC 17025, 17020, or 17065 is accepted in over 100 economies worldwide.

The benefits are significant:

• Removal of technical barriers: Importing countries can rely on test results and certifications from accredited organisations in exporting countries, reducing the need for duplicative testing and inspection at borders. For instance, allergen testing carried out by a UKAS-accredited laboratory is trusted in other signatory economies without repeat testing.
• Increased efficiency: Products move through supply chains more quickly, reducing delays and costs — critical for highly perishable goods like berries, dairy, and seafood.
• Trust in equivalence: MRAs establish confidence that assessments carried out in one country are equivalent to those in another, even when regulatory frameworks differ. This consistency supports consumer safety worldwide.
• Support for SMEs: Smaller food producers and exporters benefit from reduced compliance burdens, enabling them to access international markets more competitively.

In the absence of MRAs, international trade would face costly duplication of attestations of quality, undermining both efficiency and consumer trust. In a global food system, these agreements are essential to building the resilience and stability needed for food security.

Supporting sustainable food systems

As the world faces the dual pressures of feeding a growing population and addressing the impacts of climate change, accreditation also has a critical role to play in sustainability. Accredited activities support more sustainable practices by:

• Verifying organic, Fairtrade, and carbon-neutral claims through accredited certification bodies
• Assuring compliance with environmental and ethical sourcing standards (e.g. accredited certification to ISO 14001 for environmental management)
• Enabling traceability in supply chains, helping to prevent deforestation-linked commodities such as palm oil or soya from entering markets undetected
• Reducing food waste by verifying shelf-life testing, storage monitoring, and contamination prevention

Accreditation provides impartial evidence that sustainability claims are valid, helping governments, businesses, and consumers make informed choices that balance food security with environmental stewardship.

Collective action for a better future

World Food Day reminds us that the future of food depends on collective action. Accreditation is a quiet but vital part of this effort: invisible to most consumers, yet critical in enabling safe food, sustainable practices, and international trade.

By underpinning trust in food systems across borders and reducing unnecessary technical barriers, accreditation embodies the spirit of this year’s theme: working hand in hand for better foods and a better future.