7 replies to this topic

[Overworked]

Anyone and everyone,

A predictable question but the experienced have the benefit of hindsight which may be of great value.
I work in the confectionary industry as a QA Manager in Canada and the company corporate office based in the US wants to qualify all plants to GFSI.
I am being asked my opinion as to whether BRC or SQF would be my preferred choice.

My experience with BRC was that it was very particular to the point of excessiveness. It also proved costly due to the expenses the plant I worked at needed to invest to adhere to the standards. How does SQF compare?

Many thanks and have a great day!

[herb b]

Hi, I don't have first hand knowledge of the SQF requirements. I am going through this process also. We have been performing 3rd party facility audits for a couple of years. Long story short, our audit company is stepping down from doing the 3rd party audit process. The new companies I have found all want to perform either the BRC or SQF audits, our choice. The information I have received is that the BRC is more tailored to our industry, while the SQF is more one size fits all? I would like to also know if that is really the case or dependent on who is actually performing the audit....

thanks, herb

Anyone and everyone,

A predictable question but the experienced have the benefit of hindsight which may be of great value.
I work in the confectionary industry as a QA Manager in Canada and the company corporate office based in the US wants to qualify all plants to GFSI.
I am being asked my opinion as to whether BRC or SQF would be my preferred choice.

My experience with BRC was that it was very particular to the point of excessiveness. It also proved costly due to the expenses the plant I worked at needed to invest to adhere to the standards. How does SQF compare?

Many thanks and have a great day!

[oronogirl]

Anyone and everyone,

A predictable question but the experienced have the benefit of hindsight which may be of great value.
I work in the confectionary industry as a QA Manager in Canada and the company corporate office based in the US wants to qualify all plants to GFSI.
I am being asked my opinion as to whether BRC or SQF would be my preferred choice.

My experience with BRC was that it was very particular to the point of excessiveness. It also proved costly due to the expenses the plant I worked at needed to invest to adhere to the standards. How does SQF compare?

Many thanks and have a great day!

Dear Canadian Baker:

I work for a Canadian packaging company. We recently had a SQF Management overview training session at our facility. And I asked our trainer which one would be the better fit for our manufacturing process and the response I got was '6 of one, 1/2 dozen of the other'. It is my opinion that both dabble in excessiveness. However, SQF has a 7th ed draft available [for free - no cost for standards] that is broken out into Modules for different industries. Even for the packaging industry some of the expectations are viewed from our standpoint at least as being too extreme for the industry. Hope this helps!!

[Charles.C]

Dear Oronogirl,

Apologies for my slight post-reformatting and many thanks for yr input.

Rgds / Charles.C

[SQFconsultant]

Hi, I don't have first hand knowledge of the SQF requirements. I am going through this process also. We have been performing 3rd party facility audits for a couple of years. Long story short, our audit company is stepping down from doing the 3rd party audit process. The new companies I have found all want to perform either the BRC or SQF audits, our choice. The information I have received is that the BRC is more tailored to our industry, while the SQF is more one size fits all? I would like to also know if that is really the case or dependent on who is actually performing the audit....

thanks, herb

SQF will roll out version 7 (currently we are in version 6) beginning of July. The impression of "one size fits all" will go away - the changes coming are substantial and welcomed. Auditors are required to follow the code of practice and in turn must adhere to the standards when auditing.

[kmk]

We are SQF level 3 certified and have been for 3 years, this year will be my 4th audit. I have been involved in writing the guidance for SQF for my industry. I have never looked at BRC because we've been required by several customers to become SQF certified, so I cannot answer to what BRC is like. The new 7th edition SQF code will take some of the repetitiveness out of the code but will not change it very much. It has always been designed with categories for the various products and processes. It is a one size fits all code and the auditors audit to the code and do not take into account the guidance document that may go with it. They have been trained this way, so the guidance is really to help you meet the code but should not be used solely (if there is one available for your product). I consider the points of the SQF code to be so particular to the point of excessive. The minor non-conformances that I have received in the past were so minor someone from the outside might think "you got written up for that?" Not knowing your business I have no idea how much you will have to invest to meet the standard but you will most likely have to make some changes for whatever standard you choose. Good Luck!

[Katja]

We had this same thought a few years ago and went to many seminars that showed the differences between SQF,BRC and FSSC 2200. We end up choosing SQF because it was very prescriptive, DO this black and white which would mean less error due to our interpretation. Some of our major clients also preferred SQF. We also looked at the availability of auditors in our area, at the time there were not too many FSSC auditors then as there are now. The availability of auditors is important because if there are no SQF, BRC or FSSC auditors close by you will have to pay more for travel...
I personally prefer FSSC and we will consider making the switch in a few years.
good luck

[GMO]

I think BRC v 6 will be improved once the guidelines come out, some of the requirements are pretty costly at the moment for low risk factories and I think they will step back from some of them in the guidelines so if you're not thinking of going for it soon, BRC might be fine.

My only experience of SQF is on here and it gets my goat how it messes with Codex definitions of validation and verification. It would drive me too potty!