BRC Certification Support

What is BRC accreditation?

The BRC Global Standard for Food Safety is a recognised standard that the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) uses as a benchmark, which means it’s accepted by many of the world’s largest companies. Achieving the certification ensures your customers have confidence in your products and processes.

What is involved in a BRC audit?

A BRC audit is completed by a qualified auditor. The auditor will visit your business and look at your premises, your processes and procedures in place and discuss these with senior management to gain an understanding of what the management team has on these and how they ensure that they are carried out by employees.

What is needed to pass a BRC audit?

There are a number of areas that must have the correct processes in place to achieve BRC certification and be placed in the BRC directory, including:

• Senior management commitment
• The food safety plan
• Food safety and quality management systems
• Site standards
• Product control
• Process control
• Personnel
• High-risk, high-care and ambient high-care production risk zones
• Requirements for traded products

Find out how we helped Woods Food Service achieve BRC certification in our case study.

What are the Levels of BRC certification?

The grading scale for BRCGS audits goes from AA as the highest to Uncertified in the below BRC audit grades order: 

• AA (5 or fewer minor issues)
• A (5 – 10 minor issues)
• B (11 – 16 minor or 1 major and 10 or fewer minor issues)
• C (17 – 24 minor or 1 major and 11 – 16 minor or 2 major and 10 or fewer minor issues)
• D (25 – 30 minor or 1 major and 17 – 24 minor or 2 major and 11 – 16 minor issues)
• Uncertified (1 or more critical or 31 or more minor or 1 major and 25 or more minor or 2 major and 17 or more minor or 3 or more major issues)

An audit is carried out by a qualified auditor. Unannounced audits will have a ‘+’ after the BRC audit grades, for example, AA+ to indicate that the audit was completed without the company having prior knowledge.

What are the BRC accreditation costs?

The cost of securing BRC certification depends on how large your site is and what you already have in place. The standard BRC accreditation cost is a £300 admin fee but you may need to pay more to auditing companies to look at certain areas of your business. Following the audits, you may then need to invest in certain areas of your business to bring them to accreditation level – so total costs are individual to your food manufacturing businesses circumstance.

How InVentry can help you pass a BRC audit?

The Security of your food manufacturing site is just one of the criteria that you need to pass in order to secure BRC certification. InVentry’s visitor management system for food manufacturing settings is designed to provide a real-time view of who is on your site at all times. Having this in place will help you secure BRC accreditation.

Contact us for more information on how we can help you secure BRC certification. Alternatively, fill in the below form and one of our food manufacturing visitor management team will get back in touch with you to discuss your requirements.