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GFSI: Global Food Safety Initiative

The Global Food Safety Initiative does not certify anybody and does not audit anybody: it benchmarks other organisations' certification programmes against its own requirements, so that a retailer can accept a certificate from any recognised programme instead of running its own audit.

What it is
Benchmark
Published by
The Consumer Goods Forum
GFSI recognised
Not applicable
When it started
Launched in 2000
Where it is used
The reference point for retailer and manufacturer certification requirements worldwide

What GFSI is

GFSI is an initiative of the Consumer Goods Forum. Its output is a set of benchmarking requirements and a list of certification programme owners whose programmes have been assessed against them. A site is never certified to GFSI. A site is certified to BRCGS, FSSC 22000, IFS, SQF or another recognised programme, and that certificate is described as GFSI-recognised.

The reason the distinction matters in practice is that retailers and manufacturers write GFSI recognition into their supplier requirements. A customer asking for GFSI certification is asking for a certificate from any recognised programme, and the choice between them is usually made on which one the customer's other suppliers hold, which one the site's certification body offers locally, and which scheme's structure fits the operation.

Recognition is granted to a programme for a defined scope: a programme recognised for food manufacturing is not automatically recognised for primary production or for packaging manufacture. A site checking whether its certificate satisfies a customer should check the scope as well as the programme.

GFSI also runs a Global Markets Programme, which is a non-certification assessment for sites that are not yet ready for a full certification audit. It produces a report and an improvement path rather than a certificate, and a customer asking for GFSI certification will not usually accept it in place of one.

What benchmarking actually is

GFSI does not audit sites, does not issue certificates and does not employ auditors. It publishes a set of benchmarking requirements describing what a food safety certification programme must contain, and it assesses whole schemes against them. A scheme that passes is recognised. The site is then certified by a certification body against that scheme, which is two steps removed from GFSI.

The assessment covers the content of the standard, but also the scheme's governance: how auditors are qualified and calibrated, how certification bodies are approved and monitored, how integrity complaints are handled, and how the scheme owner acts when an audit turns out to have been wrong. That second half is the part buyers rarely read and the part that actually distinguishes a recognised scheme from a standard somebody wrote.

Recognition is scoped. A scheme is recognised for specific scopes of operation, and a scheme recognised for food manufacturing is not automatically recognised for storage and distribution or for packaging manufacture. A supplier holding a certificate in the wrong scope has a valid certificate that does not answer the customer's question.

What recognition does and does not tell a buyer

Recognition tells a buyer that the scheme behind a certificate meets a common bar, which is what makes certificates from different schemes comparable enough to accept interchangeably. That is the whole commercial point: it is the mechanism that stopped every retailer requiring its own audit.

It does not tell a buyer that the site is safe today. A certificate records an audit on particular days against a sample of records, and a scheme's own grade or score is a statement about that audit. The FDA recall data on this site is full of firms that held current certification at the time of a recall, which is not evidence that certification is worthless; it is evidence of what a point-in-time assessment can and cannot cover.

Nor does recognition make schemes identical. They differ in how they score, whether they grade or total, how much of the audit is unannounced, and how they treat a critical failure. Those differences are the reason a customer names one scheme rather than asking for any recognised certificate.

The Consumer Goods Forum, and who pays for it

GFSI is a coalition operating under The Consumer Goods Forum, a global industry network of retailers and manufacturers. It was created in 2000 in response to a specific problem: every major retailer was running its own supplier audit programme, suppliers were being audited repeatedly against overlapping requirements, and none of the results were accepted by anybody else.

It is therefore funded and directed by the buyers and the manufacturers, not by a regulator and not by the certification bodies. That is worth knowing when reading its requirements: they are written by the people who rely on the certificates commercially, which is why so much of the benchmarking is about audit integrity rather than about food science.

Certification, and why it may not apply

There is no GFSI certificate and no GFSI audit. A site holds a certificate from a GFSI-recognised certification programme, issued by a certification body accredited for that programme.

The recognised programmes change over time as programmes are added, re-benchmarked against a new version of the requirements, or withdrawn. GFSI publishes the current list, which is the only place worth checking it.

GFSI recognition

GFSI is the benchmark itself. It recognises certification programmes; it does not certify sites.

Where this meets United States regulation

A site selling into the United States is held to 21 CFR whether or not it holds a certification. These are the parts that bear on GFSI, reproduced in full on this site because title 21 is United States public domain.

What goes wrong in practice

Certification is a statement about a system on the day it was audited. FDA recall records are what happened afterwards, across the whole industry, and these are the hazards that appear most often in the records a plan built to GFSI is meant to control.

What Krolda does with GFSI

GFSI publishes no clause tree for a site to be audited against, so there is nothing for Krolda to map. What Krolda maps is the recognised scheme a site actually holds.

Questions

What does GFSI stand for?
GFSI stands for the Global Food Safety Initiative, an initiative of the Consumer Goods Forum. It benchmarks food safety certification programmes against its own requirements and publishes the list of programmes that meet them.
Can a site be GFSI certified?
No. GFSI does not certify sites and does not conduct audits. A site is certified against a GFSI-recognised certification programme such as BRCGS, FSSC 22000, IFS or SQF, and that certificate is what a customer asking for GFSI certification is asking for.
Which schemes are GFSI-recognised?
The recognised list is maintained by GFSI and changes as programmes are added, re-benchmarked or withdrawn, so the current list is worth reading at mygfsi.com rather than anywhere else. The programmes most commonly held by food manufacturers are BRCGS, FSSC 22000, IFS and SQF. Recognition is granted for a defined scope, so a programme recognised for food manufacturing is not automatically recognised for primary production or packaging.

The other standards

Whatever a site is held to, the audit asks for the evidence behind each clause, and finding it is the work. Krolda maps supplier documents to the clause they satisfy in FSSC 22000, IFS Food and 21 CFR 117, and routes the corrective action when the evidence is missing.

Early access

Recall records come from the openFDA food enforcement API, published by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the public domain. Krolda adds the hazard classification and the clause mapping; neither is an FDA determination. Always check the FDA notice before acting on a recall.