IFS Food is a food safety and quality certification standard managed by IFS Management GmbH, developed originally by German and later French retail associations. It is recognised by the Global Food Safety Initiative and is widely required in continental European retail supply, particularly for private label manufacturing.

What is a knock-out criterion in IFS?

A knock-out criterion is a requirement whose failure determines the audit outcome on its own, rather than costing a proportion of the score. IFS designates a small number of requirements this way. A site that fails one does not certify regardless of how it scored on everything else, which is why they are the requirements worth confirming before an audit rather than during one.

How does IFS scoring work?

Requirements are scored individually and the total determines whether the site certifies and at what level. Because the outcome is a number rather than a letter grade, the same site's performance is directly comparable year on year, which is one of the practical differences between IFS and the graded schemes.

Early access How it works

IFS Food: International Featured Standards Food

IFS Food is a GFSI-recognised certification standard developed by German and French retail associations, and it scores a site numerically rather than grading it, which makes year-on-year comparison of the same site straightforward.

What it is: Certification scheme
Published by: IFS Management GmbH
GFSI recognised: Yes
When it started: 2003, by German retail; French retail joined in 2005
Where it is used: Continental European retail, especially German, French and Italian private label
Issue Krolda maps: v8

What IFS Food is

IFS began as a retailer standard from the German and later French retail federations and is now managed by IFS Management GmbH. It is strongest in continental European retail supply, particularly for private label manufacture.

The audit produces a score. Requirements are scored individually, certain requirements are designated as knock-out criteria whose failure ends the audit outcome regardless of the rest, and the total determines whether the site certifies and at what level.

The standard covers governance and commitment, the quality and food safety management system, resource management, operational processes, measurement and analysis and improvement, and food defense. A separate product and process assessment runs alongside the document review.

IFS publishes several standards beyond food, including logistics, broker, packaging material and wholesale and cash and carry. As with BRCGS, a customer requirement naming IFS usually means IFS Food unless it says otherwise.

IFS publishes the full standard free, which is the reason Krolda is able to map it in full. The copyright remains with IFS and the text is not reproduced here.

Who owns IFS, and why retailers wrote it

IFS Food was created in 2003 by the Handelsverband Deutschland, the German retail federation, to give German retailers one supplier audit in place of many. In 2005 the French Federation des entreprises du Commerce et de la Distribution joined and the standard became jointly German and French, with Italian retail associations participating later. It is administered by IFS Management GmbH, based in Berlin.

The ownership matters to how the standard reads. IFS was written by buyers for their own private label supply, not by a certification body selling audits and not by a regulator. That shows in the weight it puts on product and process conformity against the customer specification, which is a commercial concern as much as a food safety one, and in how much of the audit is spent on the floor rather than in the document room.

It is strongest where it came from. A supplier into German, French or Italian retail, particularly a private label manufacturer, is far more likely to be asked for IFS Food than for a standard of equivalent recognition from elsewhere.

The IFS family, and which one a customer means

IFS publishes a family of standards for different links in the chain, and they are separate certificates with separate scopes. IFS Food covers processing and handling of loose food. IFS Logistics covers transport and storage. IFS Broker covers businesses that trade goods without handling them, including agents and importers. IFS HPC covers household and personal care products. IFS Wholesale and Cash and Carry covers that trade. IFS PACsecure covers packaging material manufacture.

There is also IFS Global Markets, which is a graduated entry programme with basic and intermediate levels for sites not yet ready for full certification. It is a development programme rather than a GFSI-recognised certification, and reading a Global Markets assessment as equivalent to an IFS Food certificate is the single most common misreading in this family.

A customer requirement that says only IFS means IFS Food unless it says otherwise. A warehouse cannot hold IFS Food and a broker cannot either, which is why a supplier approval that asks for IFS and receives an IFS Logistics certificate has received a valid certificate answering a different question.

How the score is built, and why it is a number

IFS scores rather than grades, and this is its most distinctive feature. Each requirement in the standard is assessed individually and assigned a rating, from full compliance down through partial compliance to non-compliance, with points awarded or deducted accordingly. The points are totalled and expressed as a percentage of the achievable total, and the percentage determines both whether the site certifies and at what level. Sites that clear the higher threshold certify at a higher level than those that only clear the lower one.

A small number of requirements are designated knock-out criteria. These are not weighted more heavily, they are categorical: a failure against a knock-out determines the outcome on its own, and no amount of performance elsewhere compensates for it. A deviation judged a major has a similar effect on the arithmetic, taking a large fixed proportion off the total rather than the points for that one requirement.

The practical consequence is that IFS results are comparable in a way graded results are not. The same site audited two years running produces two percentages, and the difference between them is a measurement. Two sites audited by different auditors in different countries produce two percentages against the same requirement list. That comparability is the reason procurement teams in this market tend to prefer it, and it is also its main criticism: a percentage invites being read as a food safety score, which it is not, because it aggregates requirements of very different consequence.

Alongside the requirement scoring, a product and process assessment is carried out on the floor, checking that what the documented system says is what the line is doing. A system that scores well on paper and fails there is the failure mode the assessment exists to catch.

Announced, unannounced, and the audit window

IFS certificates are issued for a fixed period, and the recertification audit has to fall inside a defined window calculated from the certificate date rather than whenever the site is ready. Missing the window has consequences for the certificate's continuity that a late audit cannot undo retrospectively, which is why the date is tracked as a deadline rather than a diary entry.

Audits are available announced or unannounced, and the scheme requires unannounced auditing at a defined frequency rather than leaving it entirely to the site. An unannounced audit is the same standard assessed without preparation time, which is a materially different test of whether the system runs when nobody is watching.

For a site, the operational difference is where the evidence lives. An announced audit can be survived by assembling documents in the weeks before it. An unannounced one is passed or failed by whether the supplier certificates, the specifications and the monitoring records are current on an ordinary Tuesday.

IFS against BRCGS and FSSC 22000

All three are GFSI recognised, so a buyer that will accept any recognised certificate will accept any of them. The differences that matter are in how the result is expressed, where each is commercially expected, and what the standard was written to protect.

IFS produces a percentage and a level. BRCGS produces a letter grade, from AA down, with a plus for an unannounced audit. FSSC 22000 produces a pass against a scheme assembled from ISO 22000 plus a sector prerequisite specification plus additional requirements, with no score or grade at all. A site required to demonstrate year-on-year improvement to a customer finds that easiest under IFS, because the output is a number.

Geographically, IFS is expected in German, French and Italian retail; BRCGS in United Kingdom retail and its supply base; FSSC 22000 wherever an ISO management system already exists and in much of global manufacturing. Sites supplying several markets frequently hold more than one, which is duplicated evidence against overlapping requirements and is the practical problem a clause map exists to solve.

How certification works

A site is audited by a certification body approved by IFS and accredited for the standard. Announced and unannounced options exist and the audit produces a score, with deviations and non-conformities to be corrected within a defined window.

Knock-out criteria are the ones to understand before an audit: a failure against one is not a deduction, it is a different outcome, and the arithmetic of the rest of the score does not rescue it.

GFSI recognition

IFS Food is a GFSI-recognised certification programme. Check the current recognised list and scope at mygfsi.com.

GFSI does not certify anybody and there is no GFSI certificate. What GFSI recognition actually means.

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 IFS Food, reproduced in full on this site because title 21 is United States public domain.

21 CFR Part 11761Current Good Manufacturing Practice, Hazard Analysis, and Risk-Based Preventive Controls for Human Food

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 IFS Food is meant to control.

What Krolda does with IFS Food

IFS publishes the full standard free, so Krolda maps IFS Food in full, by clause identifier. The text is IFS copyright and is not reproduced here.

Krolda maps v8, checked against the owner’s own publication on 2026-09-13. Issues and editions change and this page does not claim to know which is current: IFS Management GmbH publishes that.

Questions

What is IFS Food?: IFS Food is a food safety and quality certification standard managed by IFS Management GmbH, developed originally by German and later French retail associations. It is recognised by the Global Food Safety Initiative and is widely required in continental European retail supply, particularly for private label manufacturing.
What is a knock-out criterion in IFS?: A knock-out criterion is a requirement whose failure determines the audit outcome on its own, rather than costing a proportion of the score. IFS designates a small number of requirements this way. A site that fails one does not certify regardless of how it scored on everything else, which is why they are the requirements worth confirming before an audit rather than during one.
How does IFS scoring work?: Requirements are scored individually and the total determines whether the site certifies and at what level. Because the outcome is a number rather than a letter grade, the same site's performance is directly comparable year on year, which is one of the practical differences between IFS and the graded schemes.

The other standards

A IFS Food 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.