by Dudley Brown
Image adapted from the film Young Frankenstein featuring Dr. Mardi Longbottom from AWRI and SWA – Sustainable Winegrowing Australia as “Little Frankie”
The purpose of certification systems of any sort is to communicate integrity between distant producers and consumers. At their best, they provide an assurance meaningful enough to sway a purchase toward a certified producer thereby creating a flywheel effect of better behaviour, better products and increased uptake by producers and consumers alike.
Given that the purpose a certification system and an associated “trustmark” is to communicate integrity, it is the minimum expectation that the the system of assessment used, the people who develop and administer the system, the system of certification and the certifiers employed all need to be transparent, fair and free from any appearance of conflicted interests.