What is BRC
BRC is the abbreviation of British Retail Consortium. BRC has specially developed a set of quality system audit standards for food suppliers. This set of standards includes assessment requirements for food suppliers' quality, safety and hygiene assurance capabilities. BRC's audit standards have been widely recognized by European food retailers, and are used by many European food retailers and purchasing groups as a threshold for supplier access. Therefore, passing the BRC audit has become an important condition for food manufacturers to sell their products into the European market. Since the BRC system was proposed in the 1990s, it has been continuously revised and improved and has now reached its seventh edition.
The BRC food safety system is also making great strides internationally. The International Confederation of Food Retailers (CIES), which has more than 200 supermarket groups around the world as members, launched GFSI – the "Global Food Safety Action Plan" last year. GFSI has recognized BRC as the standard recommended by the organization to its members. This certification, like the securities industry, evaluates the company's food safety and quality management system and determines the grade. For food companies, according to the inspection list, the number of problems found is determined, and the grade is obtained. Currently, there are grades of AA, A, B, C, and D.
BRC FOOD standard advantages
1. Standard operability, 2. Reasonable factory rating system, 3. Giving consumers confidence.
Encouraging enterprises to participate in surprise inspections "unannounced inspections" is a strong guarantee for testing the operational quality of an enterprise's food safety system. As human beings, we all have the root of laziness. We usually don’t work hard and just improvise. The same is true for companies' external inspections, which are usually relatively lax. Paying attention to hygiene before the inspection is back to Chairman Mao's famous saying: "It is easy for a person to do good deeds once in a while, but it is difficult to do good deeds all his life." Foreigners use the power of external inspection to solve this kind of inertia. You don’t know when you will be inspected, so you can only perform according to the standards honestly every day. However, as long as the factory can handle the surprise inspection, it generally has hard power in implementing standards, and in turn will convey confidence in its product safety to the outside world and win greater trust.
So, what does the factory produce? How many nonconformities are there and the factory is compliant? How to read a BRC report and learn information about a company thousands of miles away? Let's start with how to read the BRC report. The BRC report is divided into 3 parts:
1. Basic information of the factory This part
Just like a company's credit report, because it reflects the basic situation of the company at a specific point in time: name, address, contact person, production scope, company profile, audit level, etc., it tells you the framework and foundation of the company's food safety and quality management system. For this part of the content, the following three points should be noted:
First of all, we are concerned about the scope of factory certification and the level audit mode. Generally speaking, primary agricultural products require further processing and are less risky; ready-to-eat products are easy to spoil and are more risky. Of course, the higher the level, the better, that is, A is better than B, and surprise inspections are better than regular inspections.
Secondly, when did this company start to certify BRC food? Generally speaking, old companies are struggling in the market economy, and they always have some foundations in quality. Small companies have just grown up, and all aspects of regulations are imperfect. If the company written on the report has started BRC certification for a long time, such as more than three times, the product quality of this company is still guaranteed; if it is a new company and has just started certification, we cannot unilaterally think that the product quality of this company is not good. The specific content depends on the content at the end of the report, but in general, companies that have certified BRC for many years will be able to directly convey the reliability of some product quality than newly certified companies.
Finally, to see who the auditor is, consumers can request relevant information from the certification agency. Young auditors who have just started auditing are not so flexible in their grasp of standards. Although these auditors have experienced strict training and inspections by the BRC organization and audit institutions, they still have a long way to go. They need a period of tempering in product knowledge and factory categories. How to treat the reports of old auditors and new auditors? I have a mantra: There are old auditors and bold auditors at work, but there are no bold old auditors. For new auditors, the audit agency will have a strict control process. When consumers get the report written by the new auditor, they should trust him as a reference. However, it is still recommended that customers read their reports more. After all, no matter how strict the control is, there will inevitably be flaws. For experienced auditors, because they have seen many factories and written many reports, their risk assessment of factory products is more in line with the actual situation. Generally, they do not need to spend too much energy to read the reports they write, and just pay more attention to the results.
2. Check the non-conformities and their rectification status
This section tells us that the company issued several non-conformities regarding on-site documents, records, hardware, and personal hygiene within two days of the audit. The content in this section is not a snapshot of a precise point in time like the basic information about the factory. It reflects on-site findings during an audit period. For example, you are at a crime scene and notice someone stealing something. But in court, there is no physical evidence, only the testimony of witnesses. Of course, if you use your mobile phone to film the process of stealing something, you will have physical evidence. However, there is a due diligence requirement for reviewing this work, and you must keep the client confidential. Therefore, taking photos is not normally allowed during the audit process, so the auditor needs to be accompanied by someone during the audit process.
How to deal with these non-conformities? Some non-conformities are independent of the system, such as "senior management did not sign the quality manual", such as "the factory did not conduct a supplier traceability system investigation", etc. Although these non-conformities may be more problematic, they are an independent action and have little correlation with other content in the system. For these non-compliance items, readers can regard them as a point with little serial connection in the system. Its occurrence has little impact on other aspects of the system and does not have the upper-lower connection of the "iceberg model". However, some non-conformance items are systemic, such as "rat poop was found." This non-conformance item looks like a point, but it is actually a failure of the pest control system. If rat poop is found, it means that the control measures have not achieved results, which further shows that the limited analysis of the pest system does not meet the requirements. This further infers that the entire factory has insufficient training and insufficient attention to pest control, and then deduces whether other pest control measures have similar problems? More attention should be paid to such systematic non-conformities.
3. Detailed checklist section
TA records all aspects of the company's food safety and quality management system in detail, including the good and bad parts. The checklist ties the contents of Parts 1 and 2 together.
What are the basic contents of BRC’s audit standards?
1. Management commitment 2. HACCP system 3. Quality management system 4. Factory environmental standards 5. Product control 6. Process control 7. Personnel management and others.
This part is the bulk of the entire report and the most error-prone part. Due to the imperfect information recorded by the auditor during the pre- and post-inspection process, which we also call "audit bias", inconsistencies may occur. If readers read this part after getting this report, it is recommended that they read it in the order of the report, but what should they focus on? Pay attention to information such as time, numbers, frequency, etc. This information is the most prone to errors. If these areas are completely consistent and the derivation is consistent, this report will be an excellent report. But generally speaking, for companies, products from old and big brands are safer. Of course, a good audit report does not necessarily mean that the company produces good products, but learning to read the BRC FOOD audit report will make you more confident in a certain brand of food, such as milk and bread.
