Quality according
to Scherini
Today, the issue of food safety is more important than ever. For us, the pursuit of quality has always been a priority that begins from afar: it means carefully selecting our growers and harvesters, building relationships based on mutual trust, inspecting the products throughout all of their transformation phases, and guaranteeing the complete traceability of the raw materials.
Quality cannot be improvised: we’ve been building it for fifty years, day after day.
discover the production phases
Cultivation and harvesting
Each year, our company’s founders, Franco and Pierina, used to personally visit the places of origin of the raw materials, which at the time consisted almost exclusively of mushrooms. Since that time, we’ve never fallen out of the habit of visiting our suppliers, all of whom are selected growers and specialised harvesters: long-time partners with whom we maintain stable, lasting and trusting relationships, and who we periodically task with new goals.
Towards each of them, we conduct ourselves with the cordiality of a good friend, but also with the severity of a strict inspector, because the quality of our products is based on the quality of the cultivation and harvesting processes, which are the basis of the entire supply chain.
Selection, cleaning and cutting
A strict selection process takes place at the entrance to our production facilities: only the raw materials that meet specific quality standards are accepted for processing. The mushrooms, fruits and vegetables that pass this first qualitative step are subjected to thorough cleaning in order to eliminate all types of impurities, after which they are sorted by size and category, and are ultimately sliced.
All of these operations are carried out manually by dedicated quality control staff, whose watchful eyes and skilful hands guarantee each product’s compliance with the company’s high standards.
Freezing
After being processed, the raw materials move on to the IQF (Individually Quick Freezing) stage, a freezing process that uses nitrogen to ensure that the organoleptic and nutritional properties of the frozen products are maintained. IQF also has major advantages in terms of waste reduction, as it allows for individual portions of the product to be thawed out, rather than the entire quantity.
The pursuit of quality even entails the optimisation of the processing times: in fact, our raw materials are processed and frozen on the same day in order to preserve all of their freshness.
Packaging
The frozen raw materials are mechanically packaged immediately in the various product types and sizes intended for the end customers: in addition to various sizes, ranging from 10 grams up to 5 kg formats for the food service industry, customers can also opt for packaging in bags, jars/tubs and cartons.
Our company has always been extremely attentive to packaging systems and packaging details, and devotes a great deal of time and resources to constantly updating these processes, in order to offer effective storage solutions and formats that fully meet the market’s demands.
Quality control
Although each phase of the production process is closely supervised and monitored by our employees, in order to be absolutely certain of the quality of our frozen products, we conduct systematic sample analyses upon both the initial raw materials and the finished products.
Furthermore, for the mushroom product category, specific mycological analyses are carried out by our in-house mycologist, a specialised figure called upon to guarantee the quality of these products.
Safe and
certified products
The safety and quality of Scherini frozen foods are evidenced by two of the main international certifications for the sector: IFS (International Food Standard), the large-scale retail food certification that sets the requirements for every raw material production and processing phase, and BRC Food, the global food safety standard that ensures the quality of agri-food products.
