For those not familiar with GFSI, it's an effort to benchmark standards against one another (among other things) so that Food Safety standards can be recognized for what they are.
Many people in the past may make the comment that often retailers and purchasers would request specific standards because they had an agreement with the standard owner, or they understood that standard best. This was often confusing for those involved in the food industry, because as many people would often argue, BRC and SQF (as an example) were mostly the same standard anyway, looking at the same things with only some minor differences - why then, did purchasers refuse to recognize similar standards?
The opinions on that are varied, but it does look like there's a fair amount of momentum in the industry to do away with this adversarial approach. Which is good news.
So what does this mean for those involved in the food sectors?
Ideally, it means less audits, and therefore, less cost to the bottom line. A good thing for everyone involved. If a Certification Body can perform one audit, rather than 15 Certification Bodies performing 15 audits, then everyone wins (except the auditors).
So, the GFSI conference is yet one more small step to this saner world that most in the food industry pine for. We're not there yet, but there's some extremely encouraging signs. Major retailers are now accepting a multitude of standards meaning less audits for our clients.
At the most recent conference, and at the technical committee meetings, it finally looked like there was a solid consensus, and the 700 or so attendees were there kind of people needed to make decisions - CEO's, Managing Directors, Global Directors of Food Safety were the most common titles to be seen.
The next conference is in 2011, and in London. It's yet to be seen if these steps towards GFSI benchmarked standards will prevail - let's all hope it does for the industry's sake.
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