Building Shared Infrastructure For Organic Certification And Beyond

By John Foster, President, Wolf & Associates

In recent years, one need has come into sharp focus across the organic community: the need for greater consistency in how certified operations present, organize, and maintain the information at the heart of certification.

That need helped give rise to the Common OSP.

Wolf & Associates, Inc. has been pleased and privileged to work alongside Quick Organics in helping advance this effort. This work was neither publicly nor grant funded. Wolf & Associates has no financial interest in Quick Organics or any other stakeholder, nor is it benefiting financially from this effort. Both organizations contributed time, thought, and labor because we believed the work was worth doing.

We chose to act after the NOP signaled openness to such an idea at the Fall 2024 NOSB meeting in Oregon. Any individual, group, or organization could have done the same, but no one else stepped forward.

We did so for a simple reason: the organic sector benefits when its compliance tools become clearer, more consistent, and more usable. We believe that can make certification more accessible and more equitable for more people in more places.

For too long, operators, certifiers, inspectors, and reviewers have had to navigate unnecessary variation in how similar information is requested, presented, and evaluated. That creates friction for everyone, increasing confusion for operators, complicating training and review, constraining inspectors capacity, and adding duplication in a system that already asks a great deal of participants.

A Common OSP does not solve every challenge in certification, but it does create something important—a stronger shared foundation. It helps establish a more coherent framework for how organic information can be communicated across the community.

There seems to be a misconception in some quarters that this effort was primarily for commercial gain. That is inaccurate reading of what was done and why. We advanced the Common OSP because the need was real and the potential value was broad. Creating it supports a more coherent certification environment for everyone.

Quick Organics has developed tools to help users engage with certification more efficiently. The existence of such commercial offerings does not diminish the broader public value of contributing to sector infrastructure in the first place.
We are proud to have contributed to an effort grounded in service to the industry and in the belief that the organic community deserves practical tools built with care, expertise, and long-term value in mind. If this work helps move the organic sector toward greater clarity, greater consistency, and greater accessibility, then it will have been well worth doing.