The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) is a private organization that works as a "coalition of action" from the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) and brings together retailers and brand owners (manufacturers) from across the CGF membership. The GFSI operates under multi-stakeholder governance, with the objective to create "an extended food safety community to oversee food safety standards for businesses and help provide access to safe food for people everywhere". GFSI's work in benchmarking and harmonization aims to foster mutual acceptance of GFSI-recognized certification programs across the industry, with the ambition to enable a "once certified, accepted everywhere" approach.
About The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) is a business-driven initiative for the continuous improvement of food safety management systems, with the ambition to ensure confidence in the delivery of safe food to consumers worldwide. GFSI provides a platform for collaboration between some of the world's leading food safety experts from retailer, manufacturer, food service companies, service providers associated with the food supply chain, international organizations, academia, and government. The initiative was launched in 2000 following a number of food safety crises and pending changes to public laws in the food sector, including EU food law. With legal obligations for their supply chains, and compliance connected to liability, European retailers decided to use technical standards to comply with public law requirements. Since then, experts from all over the world have been collaborating in numerous technical working groups to tackle current food safety issues defined by GFSI stakeholders. Key activities within GFSI include the definition and control of minimum requirements for food safety certification programs and a robust benchmarking process. GFSI benchmarking and recognition of existing technical standards are used for food safety certification programs, with the objective to enhance confidence, acceptance, and implementation of third-party certification along the entire food supply chain. Other important activities include the development of a capacity-building program for small and/or less developed businesses to facilitate their access to local markets, and a continuous focus on food safety auditor competence to bring industry experts in collaboration with key stakeholders to a common consensus on the skills, knowledge, and attributes that a competent auditor should possess. In 2020, GFSI launched a program named The Race to the Top (RTTT), with the objective to address specific challenges in relation to lack of trust and confidence in GFSI-recognized certification. This included food safety recalls for food manufacturers with GFSI-recognized certificates in the supply chains of their Consumer Goods Forum members. In 2022, IFS reported they had requested the legality of the RTTT to be reviewed by the Federal Cartel Office under antitrust and competition law.
Benchmarking Within GFSI, benchmarking is a procedure by which a food safety-related certification programme is compared to GFSI benchmarking requirements. In 2000, food safety was a top-of-mind issue for companies due to several high-profile recalls, quarantines, and negative publicity about the food industry. There was also extensive audit fatigue throughout the industry, as retailers performed inspections or audits themselves or asked a third party to do this on their behalf. These were often carried out against food safety schemes that lacked international certification and accreditation, resulting in incompatible auditing results. CEOs of global companies came together at the Consumer Goods Forum, knowing that under new pending EU food law, "unsatisfactory inspection results should lead to appropriate action". If they could demonstrate that technical standards avoid non-compliance to food law, enforcement authorities would be less likely to prosecute their companies in the event of food safety incidents within supply chains. The CEOs agreed that consumer trust needed to be strengthened and maintained through a safer supply chain. GFSI was created to achieve this through the harmonization of food safety standards that would help mitigate liability exposure for retailers and reduce audit duplication throughout the supply chain. At the time, there was no existing scheme that could be adopted by all. GFSI therefore chose to implement benchmarking, developing a model that determines equivalency between existing food safety schemes, whilst leaving flexibility and choice in the marketplace. Benchmarking allows multiple certification programmes with GFSI recognition to enter the marketplace. This created strong competition among certification programme owners (CPO) who employ large marketing teams with annual growth targets. GFSI benchmarking implies equivalency, though the financial opportunities with certification programme fees resulted in a perverse incentive, with CPOs working to differentiate themselves from their competitors. The unintended consequence of harmonization was fragmentation due to additional CPO entrants requesting recognition for monetary gain. Companies that have to choose a certification program often hire consultants to help them decide on the best scheme, which causes confusion for stakeholders. Concerns around poor benchmarking practices in the food sector led to UNIDO publishing a framework to guide and govern benchmarking. This included a recommendation for benchmarking organizations not to recognize schemes if an international standard (ISO, IEC, ITU) already exists, is established, and is adopted by regulatory authorities. GFSI is not a CPO and does not undertake any certification or accreditation activities. However, it is structured and designed to control the minimum requirements in schemes and therefore influence certification activities. GFSI represents its Consumer Goods Forum members, and their steering committee governance have controlling interest to decide benchmarking requirements. GFSI objectives:
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