BRC vs SQF - Which would you vote for?
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!
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!
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!!
Apologies for my slight post-reformatting and many thanks for yr input.
Rgds / Charles.C
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.
I personally prefer FSSC and we will consider making the switch in a few years.
good luck
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!