SQF Scope and Outside Storage Facility

We are working on building our SQF program - and we rent a portion of a warehouse about 40 minutes away.

We have one person staffing our rented portion of the facility, where he is responsible for receiving some raw materials (low risk items) and handling a majority of our shipments.  The raw materials and finished goods are shuttled back and forth between our manufacturing facility by our DSD driver in a company vehicle - but when we receive the items in, our warehouse manager on site here at our manufacturing facility receives them in and does an inspection - checks for locks, etc.  We also have a document the DSD driver completes recording temperatures, settings, etc to show control of the product while in transport.  

Do we need to include the off-site warehouse under our scope to get SQF certification of our manufacturing facility?  Will the auditor need to make a trip there?  No manufacturing takes place there.  The owner of the facility does have a third party audit for the building.  

Thanks in advance for insight!  

My company has two location, one is about a two hour drive. We store raw ingredients as well as finished product (both RAW/low risk). We do not include this area in our scope of certification. But we treat it as a supplier, in our approved supplier policy.

Hi, I have distribution warehouses for an HOD bottled water business and we have no problem leaving them out of the scope of certification. Like Sarah said, treat them as a supplier in your program and demonstrate that you hold it to your supplier standard.

Thanks everyone!  That was tentatively our plan, so we'll move forward with them as an approved Supplier.  Appreciate the insights! 

We use an off-site freezer that we rent and we have an employee there to ship orders. Our freezer employee picks up fresh product daily in a company truck and takes it to the freezer to be inventoried. The off-site freezer is not in the scope of our audit and our auditor was fine with the Risk Assessment I performed to ensure product quality and safety while not at our SQF certified production facility.