Frozen &
Shelf-Stable Foods

Food is the category where a certificate either has a number on it or is worth nothing. These processors freeze or heat-process a crop — sweet and waxy corn, vegetables, fruit — and the same raw material leaves the plant as two quite different products: an individually frozen pack that lives or dies by an unbroken cold chain, and a retort-sterilised vacuum pack that needs no refrigeration at all. Those two are not variants of one product. They sit under different categories on the Chinese production licence, they fall in different customs headings — frozen vegetables in Chapter 7, prepared and preserved ones in Chapter 20 — and they carry different duty and different filings, with an ambient-stable low-acid vegetable bringing the processor inside the United States’ canned-food rules that a frozen pack never touches. So ask, in this order: which category of the production licence covers the exact item you are buying, and is that licence in date; what the declared shelf life is and what storage temperature it assumes; whether there is a third-party residue and microbiology report against your own market’s limits, not the supplier’s; and whether the processor is registered with China Customs as an exporting food producer. A management-system certificate is not a product test, a domestic Chinese eco-label is not organic, and a plaque awarded to a county is not a credential held by the factory standing in it.