Procedure

In the past, the trading companies commissioned individual laboratory examinations of the fruit & vegetable deliveries and also requested suppliers to undertake examinations. In the future, the results of these examinations will be entered into the joint database at HDE Trade Services GmbH (HTS) to allow an overview of the pesticide levels of the fruit & vegetables for all participating trade companies. HTS will continually analyse these results. The analyses will be carried out anonymously according to product, product group, origin and active agents and will be supplied to the trading companies; selected data will be made available to the producers to allow them to recognise the residue trends in the products at an early stage.

The participating trade companies have agreed upon a joint list of active agents, i.e. a list of pesticides for which tests are carried out. This is continuously reviewed and, if necessary, updated. The list of active agents will form the basis for all examinations commissioned by the trade companies in the future. This means that a very high level of comparability of the individual examination results can be achieved. Additional individual examinations by the individual trading companies for further active agents are not affected by this.

The participating trade companies have also agreed about a joint findings code. In this way, the anonymous examination results can be compared to facilitate a generic analysis.