IFS Food (food safety standard for processing)
IFS Food is the standard used to audit plants that process and pack food, from raw material intake to dispatch. It covers the quality management system, HACCP, plant hygiene, process control and batch traceability, and the result is expressed as a score rather than a plain pass.
The standard shows up where raw material turns into something that goes on a shelf: a processing plant, a cold store, a grading and packing line, a frozen food plant. Retail chains, German and French ones in particular, expect it from private label suppliers. BRCGS plays a similar role with a similar scope; which one a plant runs usually depends on what its customer asks for.
Before the audit a plant needs a documented HACCP plan with records from its critical points, raw material and product specifications, supplier approval, allergen and foreign body management, pest control and training. On top of that, traceability in both directions and a recall test the auditor can call on the spot: they pick a batch of finished product and ask for the raw materials it was made from and the customers it went to.
The difficulty is usually consistency between records. Forms sit next to the line and reach the binder once a shift, so the weighbridge ticket says one thing, the production log another and the warehouse a third. The mismatch surfaces precisely when someone tries to reconstruct a single batch from raw material to pallet, which is the worst moment for it, because that happens during an audit or a complaint.
You will recognise the topic if a customer raises the certificate during a private label conversation, if customer audits arrive several times a year, and if before each of them the quality manager is collecting paperwork instead of checking that records are being created on time.