Is GFSI certification really useful?

We are agents for many confectionery products and in the last week I have had two major retailers question our acceptance of GFSI certification and report as route for supplier approval. Additionally I have had  licensor insist that they require a full (32 page) supplier self audit obviously based on BRC (all clauses covered and numbered to BRC standard), copies of 25 documents and procedures and an initial site audit (by them) to approve a supplier, this is in addition to our approval process and BRC AA certificate.

My question is that with these additional requirement what is the real advantage of achieving a GFSI certification, the above indicates that they do not believe GFSI alone is adequate evidence for supplier approval, so what advantage does it carry? Thoughts?

Good morning QSDA, this question has been kicked around since GFSI came about, is my guess. As you said, many customers will still have their own audits or extensive approval programs IN ADDITION to your GFSI certificate that they will subject you to.  You could probably do a search and find a bunch even on this website.

The only concrete reason I've found for achieving and maintaining GFSI certification is if your customers require it and not having it will cost you business or if new business will directly result from obtaining it. There are less tangible benefits that vary depending on the business. The certification helps add legitimacy to your food safety program. Some sites who went through and obtained GFSI never had any previous food safety/quality type programs in place, so it greatly benefits them just by helping them step up their game. Others had robust systems in place already and only achieved GFSI because customers required it.

I'd expect to get some interesting answers on this one that vary from place to place.

We are agents for many confectionery products and in the last week I have had two major retailers question our acceptance of GFSI certification and report as route for supplier approval.

Additionally I have had  licensor insist that they require a full (32 page) supplier self audit obviously based on BRC (all clauses covered and numbered to BRC standard), copies of 25 documents and procedures and an initial site audit (by them) to approve a supplier, this is in addition to our approval process and BRC AA certificate.

My question is that with these additional requirement what is the real advantage of achieving a GFSI certification, the above indicates that  do not believe GFSI alone is adequate evidence for supplier approval, so what advantage does it carry?

 

Thoughts?

It looks like you're in the UK - for many of the retailers here, GFSI is effectively the entry requirement. With that, you have the questionable honour of being bombarded by requests of varying degrees of reasonableness. Without it many of them won't even consider you as a potential supplier these days.

The hope/ideal of BRC (or other GFSI-benchmarked schemes) unifying everyone's requirements to become some sort of all-in-one pass for approval is alas long dead...

Some of the retailer's own requirements start at BRC but then add their own CoPs etc on top, and there isn't necessarily a great deal of agreement between them, hence the desire to do their own audits as well. (Kudos to Asda on this front, for actually turning it into a BRC add-on module to help reduce some of the audit duplication).

I've also noticed a significant trend, tailing back to the Horsegate issue, for retailers and larger brands to have more significant expectations as to how agents manage their suppliers.

If you don't have BRC Agents & Brokers yourselves then you may find that implementing this helps reduce some types of request, and longer term I think we'll also start to see more customers pushing for this as mandatory for agents (already had a few take that approach at my former employer) so it may be worth looking into? If you're already well on top of your supplier base then it may not actually add that much work.

I remember sitting down the first day for SQF Auditor training, we were at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, AR and the trainer said - When a company gets SQF certified they won't have to worry about those pesky 5 to 50 additional audits every year.

That was good for about a year or so - your customers wants what they want and if they want more data or more inspections you either play ball or they can and many have dropped suppliers due to non-compliance with over-reaching requirements.

We have successfully talked to a bunch of customers for clients over the years that rescinded their extra-ordinary requirements, thus you may want to go to root cause, as to why they want this and that  - you may find as we did that many times what they think they want - they don't and it is only because people before them asked for the same items ---- eventually leading to people asking for things where they really don't know what they are asking for them and when they get them they don't know what to do with it - and it goes into a file that is never seen again.

Save yourself some time - it's ok to push back.

One company has been audited 5 times by one of our licensors, twice by us (at customer request), three times by supermarkets and 4 by GFSI auditor in the last 4 years and is asking how they can reduce this demand, the company is small, only about 20 employees and the costs soon mount up. 

One company has been audited 5 times by one of our licensors, twice by us (at customer request), three times by supermarkets and 4 by GFSI auditor in the last 4 years and is asking how they can reduce this demand, the company is small, only about 20 employees and the costs soon mount up. 

I'm just wondering how come they're still alive having paid that huge money? We're also a small company and we've never had that extreme amount of audits. And, in addition, I've never hear of "licensors": what are they? How come, they have a power to audit the same company that often? Seems like UK's creatures, no? 

Licensor holds the name of the product and understandably want to protect their name. We have no problem with audits generally but after this number and only finding a very few minor improvements and a 10 year history of good service, even we cannot see the reason for annual completion of 32 pages of questionnaire and repeat of copies of procedures and documents which have not changed since submitting 12 months previously.

How hard can one push back, getting to the point the supplier has refused additional listed products, so eventually we will have to try to find replacement supplier for licensor.

How hard can one push back

This is the crux of your problem. No one here can really answer it, because it depends on your financial relationships with your licensors and the supplier and is unique to you and your business. With any problem requiring a solution/change that could have far reaching repercussions, you will want to sit down and brainstorm those possible solutions. Some solutions that may or may not work for you:

• Reach out to the supplier to show you understand their plight and try to find out if they have any suggestions
  • Are they ok with 3 total audits a year instead of the current 3.5? Maybe they want 2 total? Is this something you can even negotiate for them?
  • Could they bring on another staff member responsible for these types of audits (Hey, this is how I got my first food safety job!) with this added cost being absorbed by the licensor
• Reach out to the licensor and explain to them that their requirements are driving away a supplier
  • Start friendly, you're solving a problem together. If they seem resistant to compromise be sure to respectfully let them know that the extra cost of finding a new supplier, or bringing on extra staff at the current supplier, (or whatever you and the supplier come up with) will be rolled over to them if a compromise can't be reached

You might have to combine some pull forward with the supplier and some pushback on the licensor.

We had a similar situation albeit with a much smaller company, asking for a supplier questionnaire. Same as you, the questions they asked were mirrors of the SQF code. I filled almost all of the answers in with the corresponding reference number from the code and "please refer to section X.X.XX". I got a call that we needed to answer the questions, not refer to our certification. I talked with the person and went through several of the questions and read the code to them and explained that when we were audited, we were in 100% compliance with all of the sections. After about half an hour I finally made the person realize the questions were identical to the SQF code. A few weeks later I received an email to the effect that the person that created the questionnaire did so to be given ONLY to suppliers that did NOT have a certification to a GFSI recognized scheme, a fact which he did not communicate before leaving the company.

You might also explain that the time savings to them would be very valuable to NOT review numerous already professionally audited companies. Money talks after all!

We had a similar situation albeit with a much smaller company, asking for a supplier questionnaire. Same as you, the questions they asked were mirrors of the SQF code. I filled almost all of the answers in with the corresponding reference number from the code and "please refer to section X.X.XX". I got a call that we needed to answer the questions, not refer to our certification. I talked with the person and went through several of the questions and read the code to them and explained that when we were audited, we were in 100% compliance with all of the sections. After about half an hour I finally made the person realize the questions were identical to the SQF code. A few weeks later I received an email to the effect that the person that created the questionnaire did so to be given ONLY to suppliers that did NOT have a certification to a GFSI recognized scheme, a fact which he did not communicate before leaving the company.

 

You might also explain that the time savings to them would be very valuable to NOT review numerous already professionally audited companies. Money talks after all!

A couple years ago, a Canadian customer came to our company to make a supplier audit. After few questions, we asked them if they were referring BRC. Turned out, they brought a BRC book with them. We showed them our BRC certificate and the "audit" ended immediately. Since they had planned some visit days, they used it for travelling around.

Days later, we found out that our sale branch in North America hadn't informed that customer about our certifications. Communication looks like very important.

• I believe the notion of GFSI is getting out there slowly.  We used to have every customer want to complete an audit of 2-3 days with us.  Now we may have 4 or 5 customer audits in a year.  And many are superficial and last only a day or less. And of course there are the addendums attached to our GFSI audits but they only take a hour or two because of the few questions.

         Maybe one day?

My thoughts on this echo those of many of the posts above. When our facility first began preparing for SQF certification in 2015, we were sold that it would be an end to additional extensive audit requests. Five years later - we're still getting audits from private label customers that state that they're audits are more "stringent" than SQF. But then they turn right around and audit us to the same standard! Hopefully things will start to slowly turn around...