What is GFSI?
GFSI stands for The Global Food Safety Initiative. It is a business-driven initiative for the development of food safety management systems to ensure food facilities are processing safe food for consumers.
The GFSI is a private organization that oversees and approves different auditing platforms as meeting their criteria. This criterion provides a universal gold-standard of recognition to specific food safety audits.
In practice, this means that a food processor or manufacturer who can point to their GFSI certification can effectively and immediately show their customers and potential customers that their plant is operating with a structured, comprehensive, and effective food safety program.
In dollars and cents, this means that if you want to reach new customers and keep existing customers, a GFSI audit and GFSI Certification will help them to know that they aren’t likely to face food safety problems with your product.
Think of GFSI as a Parent...
Their job is to make sure that all of the children or schemes/platforms follow the rules of safe food. If they do, they maintain their GFSI certification.
As the parent, GFSI has created a benchmarking process where they compare procedures of food safety-related schemes or platforms to the GFSI Guidance Document. The Guidance Document first drafted with input from food safety experts continues to help define the process in which food safety schemes can be benchmarked by GFSI and be recognized across the globe.
