It’s the question that most of those responsible for welcoming customer and certification body auditors through their factory doors ask?
Well GFSI are very busy benchmarking food safety management system standards throughout the world and they have several large retailers on board who have agreed to reduce duplication in the supply chain through the common acceptance of any of the GFSI benchmarked schemes.
The GFSI vision is ‘once certified, accepted everywhere’ and of course it is a worthy goal. Any reduction in duplication of audits and their associated costs in terms of time, effort and money would certainly be welcomed by the food industry.
My question is will it ever happen in practice? Or will we just have another layer in the already very expensive cake. Its early days so we have to wait and see.
In my experience the duplication does not necessarily come from suppliers being required to hold multiple certifications to food safety management system standards, but from the duplication caused by lack of trust in the Certification Process.
Within the BRC Standards (which have been around since 1998) we know there is still reluctance by some customers to accept (trust) certain Certification Bodies, some even going as far as to state which Certification Body must be used; or if not going quite that far they require the audit report is desk audited by their chosen Certification Body.
We also know that on top of BRC Certification many customers still carry out audits against their own standards and codes of practice; as one example take the Tesco PIU audit and there are many more.
Most suppliers have many customers and it only takes one to create another requirement and a duplicate audit.
For me it’s not the quality of the standard; they are much the same; it’s the quality of the audit that is the key to reducing duplication. With the focus on standardizing the standards I fear we will still be left with the issue of lack of trust in the certification process.
For me that can only be achieved by having an extremely robust and active Accreditation process (approving and auditing of Certification Bodies) and that is where, in my opinion, much work is still required.
Regards,
Simon
- Home
- Sponsors
- Forums
- Members ˅
- Resources ˅
- Files
- FAQ ˅
- Jobs
-
Webinars ˅
- Upcoming Food Safety Fridays
- Recorded Food Safety Fridays
- Upcoming Hot Topics from Sponsors
- Recorded Hot Topics from Sponsors
- Food Safety Live 2013
- Food Safety Live 2014
- Food Safety Live 2015
- Food Safety Live 2016
- Food Safety Live 2017
- Food Safety Live 2018
- Food Safety Live 2019
- Food Safety Live 2020
- Food Safety Live 2021
- Training ˅
- Links
- Store ˅
- More