Heritance Hotels & Resorts and Aitken Spence Hotels & Resorts announced today the successful completion of ISO 22000and HACCP certification audits for three of their properties.

ISO 22000-2005/HACCP is the latest international standard on food safety management systems, which ensures high food hygienical standards, while preserving the quality of cuisine. This will gradually become the norm and finally a mandatory requirement for all food-handling operations globally.

Heritance Kandalama, The Tea Factory and Earl''s Regency have been certified in compliance with ISO 22000 by SGS- the certifying company.

Aitken Spence, which owns and manages a chain of internationally award-winning properties, revealed that the other hotels in the chain too will be conducting certification audits. When so certified, the Company would have the distinction of being the only hotel chain in Southeast Asia to have this privilege.

Recently, the Group''s Skills Development Chef Dimuthu Kumarasinghe, who won in Singapore "The Food and Hotel Asia" Culinary Competition and the highest gold medal tally in the last Culinary Olympics held in 2004 in Frankfurt, while Aitken Spence were the runaway winners at the last Culinary Art competition in Colombo organized by the Chefs’ Guild of Sri Lanka. It has also won many prestigious international awards for food and service, the CNN American Express award for excellence in hospitality service the SAGA award continuously for 10 years, the Green Globe 21 Certification, ISO 14001 Certification and the American Leeds certification on environmental standards.

Commenting on a yet another pioneering achievement by Aitken Spence Hotels, its Managing Director Mr Malin Hapugoda said:

"We have established Food Safety Management Systems (FSMS) to ensure that all our clients enjoy safe and quality food".

"Winning many international accolades or setting new standards in the industry has not diminished our commitment to constantly offer superior service to our valued clientele. I am very pleased to say that it is this commitment by our highly-trained staff that has won us this certification"

ISO 22000 International Standard specifies the needed requirements for a Food Safety Management System. The key elements of this being the, principles of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP), interactive communication, system management, pre-requisite programmes.

During the certification process the hotels exposed their entire food chain from the producer through the supplier to the consumer, in ensuring that high standards of quality and hygiene are maintained.

Effective interactive communications throughout the food chain downstream and upstream was developed to ensure delivery of safe food.

A structural managements system was incorporated into the overall operational management system, which has been aligned with the ISO 9001 quality standard. Based on these basic standards, our chefs with advice from SGS compiled their own quality and safety standards manual for their individual hotels. While most companies would seek assistance of the auditing company for the rules, we