GFSI Recognised Schemes

When a group of global CEOs decided in 2000 and agreed that consumer trust needed to be strengthened and maintained through a safer supply chain, they founded GFSI, a global initiative that would achieve this through the harmonisation of food safety standards to reduce audit duplication throughout the supply chain. At the time, there was no existing scheme that could be qualified as “global” that could be adopted by all. GFSI therefore chose to go down the route of benchmarking, developing a model that determines equivalency between existing food safety schemes, whilst leaving flexibility and choice in the marketplace.

Benchmarking is a “procedure by which a food safety-related scheme is compared to the GFSI Guidance Document”. Upon completion of the benchmarking process, a food safety management scheme is ‘recognised’ by GFSI when all of its criteria are considered to be equivalent to the requirements set out in the GFSI Guidance Document.  Achieving equivalence against a common set of requirements means that GFSI recognized schemes have a common foundation for managing food safety which should provide consistent audit results.

On 5th January 2011, GFSI released the Sixth Edition of its Guidance Document. Food safety scheme owners whose food safety management schemes had been previously recognised against the Fifth Edition of the Guidance Document were given until 31st December 2011 to reapply for full benchmarking against the Sixth Edition. The following schemes are currently going through the GFSI Benchmarking Process.

All GFSI Recognised Scheme Owners can be contacted directly.

Dutch HACCP

The Dutch HACCP scheme which was previously recognised against the GFSI Guidance Fifth Edition has not been resubmitted to GFSI for benchmarking due to the new far reaching requirements in the GFSI Guidance Document Sixth Edition. The Foundation will focus on the management of the FSSC 22000 scheme which they also own and which has been resubmitted for benchmarking.

Dutch HACCP Option B certificates that are still in circulation in 2012 will be accepted as valid against the GFSI Guidance Document Fifth Edition during that year. However any certificates issued after 1 January 2012 will not be considered to have been issued against a GFSI-recognised scheme.