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PARIS and BERLIN, 31st August 2021 — The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), The Consumer Goods Forum’s Coalition of Action on food safety, and IFS, a globally active organisation providing trusted standards and services to co-operate within the supply chain to improve product integrity, are pleased to announce that IFS has successfully achieved recognition against GFSI’s Benchmarking Requirements Version 2020.1. The recognition encompasses IFS Food v7, IFS Broker v3.1, IFS Logistics v2.3 and IFS PACsecure v2 and is covering a very large part of the food supply chain.
Stephan Tromp, Managing Director of IFS, stated, “We are very excited to have gained the recognition against the current GFSI Benchmarking Requirements for these four IFS Standards once again. IFS stands for demanding food safety certification at the highest level. The robust standard management, our integrity programme, and the requirements that IFS Auditors must fulfil contribute to the fact that all over the world, retailers, brand owners, authorities and other stakeholders know that they can trust IFS Certificates. IFS drives the continuous improvement of the sites certified to an IFS Standard, and that is what we expect from ourselves as well. The GFSI benchmarking process gives us valuable indications to further improve our Standards. It has been a very constructive process and we thank everyone who has contributed to it.”
Elisa Carlucci, GFSI Technical Coordinator, The Consumer Goods Forum, said, “Working with IFS throughout this process has been a pleasure, and I congratulate them on gaining recognition against our GFSI Benchmarking Requirements. It’s important we continue to work together to help raise the food safety bar as new challenges and realities emerge”.
About the GFSI Benchmarking Process
Benchmarking is a procedure by which a food safety Certification Program Owner (CPO) is compared to the GFSI Benchmarking Requirements. The process is designed to be executed in an independent, unbiased, technically proficient and transparent manner. A program is ‘recognised’ by GFSI when it has been verified that it meets every single GFSI benchmarking requirement, both in procedures and in operations. An independent benchmark leader, supported by the GFSI Technical Manager, assesses whether the application meets GFSI requirements, followed by a public consultation period that is open to all GFSI Stakeholders. The benchmark leader and GFSI Technical Manager then make a recommendation to the GFSI Steering Committee regarding recognition of the programme. The full process is defined in the GFSI Benchmarking Requirements document.
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About GFSI
The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI; the Coalition) is a CEO-led Coalition of Action from The Consumer Goods Forum, bringing together 34 retailers and manufacturers and an extended food safety community to help oversee food safety standards for businesses and help provide access to safe food for people everywhere. As one of the world’s largest networks to help achieve safe food , GFSI is committed to making food safety everyone’s business and the Coalition members are addressing challenges facing food safety systems in their supply chains and the markets they operate in, and are helping to raise the food safety bar globally. Its ambition is to strengthen and harmonise food safety systems so they are able to feed the growing, global population and develop markets that can deliver food safely, no matter where in the world the consumer is. To learn more, visit www.mygfsi.com.
For further information, contact Lee Green, Communications Director, The Consumer Goods Forum: [email protected]
About IFS
With the professional expertise of retailers, manufacturers, certification bodies and other experts worldwide, IFS develops globally recognised product quality and safety standards as well as development programs. Many retailers and brand owners worldwide prefer IFS Certification. An IFS Certificate shows them that the certified company has established resilient processes to ensure food and product safety are in line with legal requirements and customer specifications. To complement this, IFS offers supportive tools and guidance documents to support the work of quality managers, auditors, and certification bodies. The common goal of IFS is to strive for the best product safety and quality management processes so that consumers can trust the products they buy. For more information, go to www.ifs-certification.com
Contact at IFS for GFSI and IFS Standard related topics: [email protected]
