Aitken Spence Hotels awarded ISO 22000

Ruwanthi Abeyakoon

ACCREDITATION: Aitken Spence becomes the first hotel chain in Southeast Asia to be awarded ISO 22000 and HACCP, the latest International Food Safety standards ensuring hygiene and quality of their entire food chain.

Heritance Kandalama, The Tea Factory and Earl's Regency have been certified by SGS in compliance with ISO 22000-2005.

"We have established Food Safety Management Systems (FSMS) to ensure our clients enjoy safe and quality food. We are committed to environmental conservation. We will take our environmental achievements to India and implement the same standards there.

The ISO 22000 was established in 2005 and we are glad that three of our hotels were able to achieve it before the end of this year," Managing Director, Aitken Spence Hotels Malin Hapugoda said.

He explained that all achievements were made in-house and at a very low cost. "The commitment of the highly trained staff has won us this certification. The MoU between the two major political parties is moving in a good direction. We are very optimistic and it will contribute to our success," Hapugoda said.

"The pioneer role was played by Heritance Kandalama. Taking it as a benchmark we focused on making the chain of hotels achieve the same standards. We firmly believe in triple bottom lines, which are social, environmental and financial.

We have also implemented a Water Safety Management System," said Social and Environmental Management Consultant, Ravi De Silva. He added that Aitken Spence have gone a step ahead of others because of the social responsibility it had.

Aitken Spence has won several other prestigious international awards for food and service.