Certificate & Product Claims Policy

1. Scope

This policy governs how vendors on SriLankaExport.com may make claims about certifications, origin, ingredients, processing, and other product attributes, and how those claims are evidenced, displayed, and verified.

2. Allowed claims and required evidence

A vendor may only use claims such as Organic, Fairtrade, ISO 9001, ISO 22000, HACCP, Halal, Kosher, SLS, Sri Lanka Tea Board Lion Logo, Pure Ceylon Cinnamon GI, FDA-registered, EU-compliant, GLOBALG.A.P., GOTS, OEKO-TEX, WRAP, ethically sourced, or similar claims if valid supporting documentation is uploaded to SriLankaExport.com and reviewed by our team during marketplace onboarding or at re-verification.

Supporting documentation must be legible, in date, and traceable to the issuing body. Where a certificate references a specific facility, production line, batch, shipment, or management system, the document scope must match how the claim is used on the listing.

3. Certificate scope must be clear

A certification rarely covers an entire vendor catalog without qualification. Vendors must indicate the scope of each claim:

• Company-level: covers the legal entity (e.g. ISO 9001 management system)
• Facility-level: covers a specific manufacturing site or processing plant
• Product-level: covers a specific SKU, grade, or product line (e.g. an organic certificate that applies to one SKU but not others in the catalog)
• Batch-level: covers a specific production run or lot
• Shipment-level: covers a specific shipment under a transaction certificate (e.g. organic transaction certificate per shipment)

4. Certificate status labels

From Wave 5 of the compliance program onward, individual product pages and vendor profiles will display per-certificate status labels. Until then, vendor-claimed certificates are reviewed at onboarding but displayed without an individual status label. Planned label set:

5. Government and protected marks

Certain marks belong to government authorities or protected schemes and may only be used when the vendor or product is genuinely authorized:

• Sri Lanka Tea Board Lion Logo: may appear only where the vendor / product is properly licensed by the Sri Lanka Tea Board
• SLS / SLSI mark: only where issued by the Sri Lanka Standards Institution for the relevant product
• Pure Ceylon Cinnamon GI: only for cinnamon products that meet the relevant GI / product specification
• FDA / CE / EU compliance marks: only where the vendor holds the relevant valid registration or conformity assessment

Vendors must not state or imply that listing on SriLankaExport.com confers any of these marks, or that our marketplace verification substitutes for the issuing body’s authorization.

6. Origin claims

Origin claims (e.g. “Made in Sri Lanka”, “Ceylon”, “Single Estate”, region-of-origin claims) must be truthful and supportable. A Certificate of Origin or origin declaration is issued by the relevant authorized body or declared by the exporter under the applicable trade scheme. It is not issued by SriLankaExport.com. Buyers relying on preferential trade arrangements (e.g. EU GSP+, UK GSP, ISFTA, REX statements) should verify the document type, exporter eligibility, and shipment value thresholds with the issuing authority or customs broker before shipment.

7. Removal and enforcement

SriLankaExport.com may remove a claim from a listing, suspend a listing or vendor account, or revoke the SLE-Verified Supplier badge at any time if a claim is found to be inaccurate, expired, suspended, unsupported, or misleading. Misrepresentation of certification status is a breach of the Vendor Agreement and the Vendor Code of Conduct.