What Is UL Certification, Anyway?
/By ARNO HOLSCHUH
Once upon a time at an unnamed company in an unnamed city, a coffee company opened a new café. They had exotic tastes in espresso machines and had purchased a beautiful, completely unheard-of model directly from a boutique European manufacturer. The crate was opened with care, the machine lifted onto the counter, and the whole staff gathered around to admire it.
“Hey,” said a bright young barista. “That machine doesn’t have a UL sticker on it.”
And at that angst-filled moment, the manager of the new café suddenly got very curious about UL. Could the machine be installed? Was it legal? Was it safe? And what, just exactly, was UL?
Underwriters’ Laboratory, founded in 1894, is an organization devoted to safety. Their primary role is to certify electrical components and appliances as safe to use. Their first certified product was a tin-clad fire-proof door. Over the past 120 years, they have certified most of the major emergent consumer technologies in our country, from blenders to e-bikes. They are currently a privately-held, for-profit LLC, having changed from a non-profit in 2012. This has an interesting corollary about what UL is not. It is not an agency, it does not pass laws, and is not in any way part of the government. It does, however, carry a level of authority that one otherwise sees mostly from government regulations.
So how does it work? The method here is the standard. UL, and its counterpart for sanitation, the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF), will research what it would take to make something safe, and the they’ll publish that as a standard that manufacturers can meet. For instance, UL states that if you have a high-voltage electric heating element, you must have a thermal cutoff. That cutoff will stop delivering power to the element if temperatures get too hot. And that thermal cutoff switch cannot part of the machine’s main brain, because it needs to work even if the brain is fried. This clause, and hundreds of others, are then collected into a standard. UL standard number 197, for instance, covers commercial cooking appliances, which includes espresso machines.
If a manufacturer wants their product to be certified, they must meet every element of every applicable standard, then send that product in for inspection. (You don’t have to use UL to inspect the UL standard, by the way. Other agencies, like Intertek, will also apply the standard.) But why would anyone bother if UL doesn’t carry the weight of the law?
The answer is that many, many local governments, insurance companies, retail chain and other key stakeholders demand that any commercial appliance carry the UL sticker. UL itself may not have the power of law, but their standards do when they are adopted by government agencies. And they might as well be law if you cannot get an insurance policy on your shop unless all the appliances are listed. This still doesn’t mean that you’ll always find a sticker on every device in every café; sometimes industrial equipment is inspected for safety by the local inspectors, as is often the case with cafe roasters. Some people are also just getting away with it, as not every local health inspector will even look for the UL or NSF mark.
To get back to our intrepid café manager above: That machine can be installed, but you may well get in hot water with one of the various inspectors that are going to have to sign off on the new café. The insurance carrier and the landlord might want to have a say too.
And finally, perhaps most importantly of all, the manager should care because the standards are there to protect the staff and the customers. They represent the best thinking in the world about how to protect the humans. As responsible members of our industry, we should always encourage safety in machine design and construction. After all, we’re the ones who will have to open the case and repair them someday.