Differentiation through a culture of Compliance
BRCGS has been at the forefront of Standards development for more than two decades. These standards are supported by a robust and expanding compliance team, whose aim is to deliver uniform compliance across all BRCGS activity and certification schemes to ensure that brand owners can have confidence in the value of BRCGS site certification.
We will publish our 2020 Compliance report in February, which sets out the latest comprehensive and stringent range of initiatives that we have invested into our programme. We make this investment as compliance is a critical cornerstone and unique selling point of our offering, which serves to avoid repeated, costly re-audits that are often conducted in addition to the BRCGS third party audit.
Our Insight tool providers brand owner with a suite of information to review and track the performance of supplier sites by standard, market and category. The performance management and graded scoring of our delivery partners provides sites with a transparent choice of certification partner, and our qualifications and examinations portfolio ensures that individual auditors are competent. This is further strengthened by our 23 person compliance team that continue to undertake visits to sites to ensure our scheme is meeting our expectations. An increasing number of these visits are unannounced to further improve robustness of the scheme.
In January, we launched TellBRCGS, a global reporting system for reporting problems and audit issues, to further strengthen our compliance and supplier assurance offering. We now offer suppliers, brands and certification bodies access to a confidential reporting system. This system captures internal feedback from anyone in the organisation, anonymously where preferred, that can highlight emerging issues that could impact many areas of compliance. To support the launch, we published a white paper to provide guidance on how to set up an effective whistleblowing system. Given the importance of food safety and its associated impact on consumer trust, an effective whistleblowing system is clearly an important investment. The paper provides a simple four-step guide.