I know how everyone likes success stories, so I thought I'd post ours.
I work for a plastic injection molding plant, who for a long, long time operated under the "housewares" rule of the FDA (so I was told) - no one ever came to visit, and we had few customers that required anything special. Then came along a rather large customer that required its vendors to become GFSI-certified. I was tasked with researching and developing this program. We began looking into this process and it quickly became apparent that it would be no small feat to accomplish, as we had almost no procedures written down and the culture/environment were not suited for something such as GFSI. We had a pre-assessment (using it as our GAP analysis) and found we had a very long way to go.
Fast-forward a bit...I discovered this forum and was instantly hooked. Between my own research/questions and the threads already available on here, I was able to build my company's SQF system nearly from the ground up. I found an invaluable amount of advise and assistance on here and have been recommending you guys to everyone I can think of ever since! As an added caveat, my management/ownership team has been behind me 110% throughout the process - even moving us into a new building! - in order to make this happen. I've been very fortunate in that area.
We had our first desktop audit in May and received 2 minor non-conformances, easily fixed, and our first SQF certification audit last week received a provisional score of 96! I understand that the report from our CB is go to through another review and the "final" score won't be available for a little bit, but we don't anticipate any issues.
I just wanted to thank all of you for your help, this is a wonderful site, a great resource and everyone on here has been more than helpful. THANK YOU!!