From ZED Bronze to ZED Gold: What Each Level Checks
Jagannath Polymers Pvt Ltd (JPPL), the manufacturer behind PackSmith, first got certified at Bronze level under the government's MSME Sustainable (ZED) Certification Scheme. That was our entry point.
We did not stop there. We moved up to Silver, and today we hold ZED Gold, the top level of the scheme. You can see all three on the scheme's public list of certified MSMEs, where our Bronze and Silver show as upgraded and Gold shows as active.
ZED stands for Zero Defect, Zero Effect. Zero defect is about quality. Zero effect is about the environment. The scheme is run by the Ministry of MSME, Government of India, with the Quality Council of India as a partner.
We are proud of it, and we also know its limits. I want to explain what each level really means, including where it stops. A certificate is only useful to you if you know what was checked.
What are the three ZED levels?
As per the scheme's 2022 guidelines, there are three levels, and each one checks more than the one below it.
- Bronze checks 5 parameters.
- Silver checks 14 parameters.
- Gold checks all 20 parameters.
Bronze is the entry level. It is verified on documents and photos that the company uploads, plus a signed declaration that it meets all legal and statutory rules. Silver and Gold go further, with an onsite assessment at the plant.
So I will be plain about it. Bronze is a first step, not the top of the ladder. That is exactly why we did not want to stay there. Gold means an assessor has checked all 20 parameters, and the plant itself, not just our photos.
What does Bronze actually check?
Bronze is still the best place to start understanding ZED, because every higher level builds on it. The 5 Bronze parameters for a manufacturing unit are these.
- Leadership.
- Swachh workplace, i.e. a clean and organised shop floor.
- Occupational safety at the workplace.
- Measurement of timely delivery.
- Quality management.
To apply, a company uploads photos of its products, its shop floor, its product labelling and its fire safety systems. It also gives details of its processes, quality certificates and customers.
Why should a packaging buyer care?
In our trade, two of those five points touch your order directly.
The first is timely delivery. ZED does not ask whether you deliver on time. It asks whether you measure it. That sounds small, but a factory that does not track late orders cannot fix them. If your dispatch slips by a week, the cause is usually somewhere nobody was looking.
The second is quality management. In tapes and films, quality problems are rarely dramatic. They are small drifts. Adhesive a little thinner, a roll a little shorter, a core a little soft. A written quality system is how you catch the drift before the buyer does.
The other three points, a clean workplace, safety and leadership, decide whether the first two survive a busy month. A messy, unsafe floor makes mistakes when the pressure is on, and November in ecommerce is all pressure.
What does ZED not tell you?
It does not test the product you are buying. Even Gold is not a lab report on our BOPP tapes or our courier bags.
For product claims, ask for the specific certificate behind that product. ZED tells you about the factory. It does not certify any one product.
My advice, even if you buy elsewhere, is simple. When a supplier shows you a certificate, ask three things.
- Who issued it?
- What exactly did it check?
- Is it still valid today?
If the supplier cannot answer all three in one call, treat the certificate as decoration.
What did it take for us?
For Bronze, the documents were the easy part. Silver and Gold are different, because an assessor walks the floor. The real work was reviewing our own processes and fixing what we found, so that the shop floor an assessor sees is the shop floor we run every day. We still think that habit is the useful part of any certification, more than the paper on the wall.
If you want to check our documents before a bulk order, ask us and my team will send them across.
