According to one study, each year, 1 in 6 Americans gets sick from food that they ate.
If you don’t want to make people sick with your food, you should go through GFSI audits. When you go through these audits, you’ll get a certification saying that your food is safe to eat.
But what is GSFI, and what should you expect with an audit? Keep reading to find out!
What is GFSI
The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) is to help create food safety management systems. This will make sure that food facilities are processing foods that are safe for people to eat.
This is a private organization that runs audits and hands out certifications if the business meets their standard. Their certification is universal, and they have the gold standard in food safety audits.
Many customers look for this certification so that they can trust their food provider. So for businesses, it’s a great advantage to have this mark on your company.
What Are the Benefits
While getting more customers is great, you’ll have a safer supply chain as well. You’ll be able to decrease the number of foodborne diseases and product recalls.
Since you’ll be certified, you also won’t have to deal with as many audits afterward.
Doing stock audits at regular intervals of time helps in reconciling books and actual stock values. At times, when the stock comes out to the storefront from the back and when any client lodges damage complain about the product that is not recorded in the system, the numbers of actual inventory levels start differing from the book numbers.
Choose a Scheme
The GFSI has different food safety schemes that you can be certified in. There’s no one audit for a GFSI audit, but really, you’ll have to go through several to get one of the benchmarked schemes.
Some of the more popular ones are SQF, International Featured Standards (IFS), Global Red Meat Standard, Global Aquaculture Alliance Seafood, Japan Food Safety Management Association, and the Global Gap.
Schedule Audit
If you’re interested in getting one of those certifications, you’ll first have to schedule a GFSI audit.
If you’ve never done this before, you might want to stick with a pre-assessment. This will give you a list of all the things that you should fix, but you won’t get a score.
You can fix all of those things before you have an actual certification audit, where you will get a score.
Address Problems
Part of getting the certificate means that you’ll have to address any findings before a certain deadline. If you’re really not running a great operation, you may have too many things to fix and won’t meet the deadline.
It doesn’t matter how serious the findings are. If you’re not compliant before a deadline, you won’t get your certification.
Typically, you’ll have about a month to fix each finding. An auditor will come back after that deadline to ensure that you followed up with everything.
Discover More About GFSI Audits
These are only a few things to consider with GFSI audits, but there are many more things to expect.
We know that running any kind of business can be overwhelming, but we’re here to help you.
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