Voluntary food safety certifications: ISO 22000, FSSC, BRCGS, IFS

What they are and why they exist

Regulation 852/2004 sets a minimum level of safety, the same for all operators. The market, however, often asks for more: large retailers and branded industry want standardised, verifiable assurances from their suppliers without having to inspect each establishment themselves. Voluntary certifications arose to meet this need: a private standard sets detailed requirements, a third-party body verifies them through periodic audits, and the resulting certificate becomes a common language between supplier and customer.

The technical core remains hazard analysis and the HACCP principles Article 5(2) of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 together with the hygiene prerequisites: all of these schemes presuppose and extend them, adding requirements on management, traceability, food defence, authenticity (food fraud) and continual improvement.

Accreditation: why the certificate is credible

A certificate is worth as much as the independence and competence of whoever issues it. The European system guarantees this reliability through accreditation: Regulation (EC) No 765/2008 provides that each Member State has a single national accreditation body — ACCREDIA in Italy, UKAS in the United Kingdom, and so on. The accreditation body verifies that certification bodies are competent and impartial under ISO/IEC 17021 (management systems) or ISO/IEC 17065 (products and schemes). Across Europe, accreditations are mutually recognised through the EA-MLA multilateral agreement (European co-operation for Accreditation): a certificate issued under an accredited body is therefore recognised by the other signatories. This — not a non-existent single legal title — is what makes a certificate «recognised» across borders.

GFSI: the benchmark of schemes

The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) is an industry initiative that does not certify directly but benchmarks schemes: it assesses whether a standard meets a set of minimum requirements and, if so, «recognises» it. GFSI recognition is the key to many international supply chains, because major retailers accept any recognised scheme (FSSC 22000, BRCGS, IFS and others), avoiding duplicated audits. ISO 22000 is not, on its own, GFSI-recognised: FSSC 22000 is, and it builds on ISO 22000 by adding technical prerequisite programmes and additional requirements.

The four main schemes

The detailed profiles are gathered in this section:

In short: ISO 22000 is the international ISO standard for food safety management systems; FSSC 22000 is the GFSI scheme built on ISO 22000; BRCGS Food Safety and IFS Food are retail-driven standards, particularly widespread in the British and in the Franco-German markets respectively.

Relationship with the obligations under Regulation 852/2004

The point must be stressed, because it is the source of the most costly misconception. Voluntary certification does not replace registration Article 6(2) of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004, does not replace the obligation of HACCP procedures Article 5(1) of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 and does not replace training Annex II, Chapter XII, point 1 of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004. A company certified to FSSC 22000 remains fully subject to official control by the competent authority Article 6(1) of Regulation (EC) No 852/2004. The certificate may facilitate the control, as documentary evidence of the system, but it neither excludes nor replaces it. Conversely, none of these schemes is a legal title: those who lack them remain perfectly compliant if they discharge the Regulation's obligations. The distinction between obligation and commercial choice is set out further in why there is no certificate under Regulation 852/2004.