In the food and beverage industry, compliance audits are a critical part of maintaining quality, safety, and regulatory adherence. These audits occur periodically, often driven by regulatory updates, retailer requirements, or certification renewals, ensuring businesses stay compliant with evolving industry standards.
Understanding Compliance Audits in the Food & Beverage Industry
Compliance in the food and beverage sector means ensuring that all aspects of production and supplier management—such as food safety, quality control, and traceability—meet regulatory requirements (e.g., CSDDD) and industry standards (e.g., retailer-specific guidelines and supplier questionnaires).
An audit is a structured review to verify that a company is following these regulations and standards. During a compliance audit, auditors examine procedures, records, and practices to confirm alignment with legal and industry expectations. Within the EU, two key focus areas dominate audits:
Food Safety and Quality Regulations: Audits check compliance with EU laws and retailer requirements, including HACCP principles, ISO 22000, and the EU Hygiene Package. Many businesses also rely on well-recognized certifications such as GLOBALGAP, BRCGS, FSSC 22000, and IFS, which cover different aspects of food safety and quality, from primary production to processing.
Sustainability Compliance: Audits assess how companies meet EU regulations on sustainable sourcing, packaging, and environmental impact, including the EU Deforestation Regulation, CSRD, and CSDDD under the EU Omnibus Proposal.
Ensuring Audit Success: 4 Critical Questions to Assess Your Compliance Preparation
As supply chains grow in complexity, compliance audits require greater preparation to avoid delays, strain on resources and unfulfilled orders. Below are four targeted questions to evaluate your team’s readiness.
Q1: What Documentation is Essential for an Audit?
Well-prepared document management is the backbone of a successful audit. To ensure your team is well prepared, focus on three core areas:
Mandatory Food Safety and Quality Certifications: Align documentation with relevant standards (e.g., Global GAP for primary production, BRCGS/FSSC 22000/IFS for manufacturing).
Supplier and Product Compliance Records: Ensure all certificates, agreements, and traceability data are current and accurate, covering the entire supply chain.
Regulatory Compliance Documents: These include documents describing ethical sourcing, environmental impact, and corporate responsibility measures, such as CSRD, CSDDD and EUDR.
Q2: What are the major challenges for ensuring compliance?
Maintaining compliance in the food and beverage industry is becoming increasingly complex due to evolving regulations, growing supply chain demands, and the need for accurate documentation. Many companies face common obstacles that make audits more challenging. Below is a breakdown of the key compliance challenges:
Managing Large Volumes of Documentation: Food safety and compliance require extensive documentation, from supplier certifications to traceability records. This often results in a massive amount of paperwork, spreadsheets, and email chains to track every detail, certification update, and supplier Without a structured system, managing these documents can quickly become overwhelming, leading to misplaced records, outdated information, and inefficiencies in audit preparation.
Navigating Complex Regulations: Staying compliant in the food and beverage industry is more challenging than ever, as regulations continue to evolve and expand beyond traditional food safety requirements. Businesses must not only meet existing food safety and quality standards, but also comply with broader regulations concerning sustainability, human rights, and corporate responsibility. Keeping up with these changes requires continuous analysis, adaptation, and coordination across supply chains.
Missing Compliance Insights in Multi-Tiers: Large food supply networks often involve multiple tiers of suppliers, including raw material producers, processors, distributors, and exporters. Many companies lack direct oversight of lower-tier suppliers and products, making it difficult to verify ethical sourcing, traceability, and compliance at all levels.
Lack of Data Integration: Many companies collect vast amounts of compliance-related information. However, this data is often stored across multiple platforms, departments, or even in outdated manual systems like spreadsheets and emails. Without a single source of truth, retrieving critical compliance documents during audits or inspections becomes time-consuming and error-prone.
Q3: What happens during an audit?
The audit typically begins with a thorough examination of documentation, where auditors assess the validity and completion of records, including supplier certifications, traceability logs, quality control procedures, and previous audit reports. Any missing, outdated, or inaccurate documentation can raise compliance red flags.
To test traceability and supply chain transparency, auditors often request sample traceability exercises where companies must demonstrate their ability to track a product’s origin, and journey through the supply chain, as well as its compliance status. If non-conformities are identified during the audit, companies must be prepared to present corrective action plans that outline how they will address the issues and prevent future occurrences.
Q4: What proactive steps can be taken to ensure audit success?
Assess Current Compliance Status
Conduct internal audits to identify gaps before the official audit
Ensure all required documents are up to date
Organize and Update Documentation
Gather key records like Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), training logs, supplier certificates, and past audit reports
Use a digital system to keep documents organized and accessible
Implement Corrective Actions
Address any non-conformities identified in internal assessments
Set clear deadlines and responsibilities for improvements
How Agriplace Helps Businesses Stay Compliant and Audit-Ready
Customize Your Requirement Rules For Data Collection
The Supply Chain Approval module automates the collection and management of supplier and product documents—including certifications, inspection reports, and lab analyses—by managing them in a unified digital platform.
By creating customizable requirement rules for compliance data retrieval, the platform automatically collects the information when target suppliers upload and publish mandated documents (e.g., an GFSI certificates) directly on the Agriplace platform. This eliminates manual follow-ups, drastically reducing administrative workload.
Automation ensures records are consistently up-to-date and minimizes human error. Real-time alerts for expiring certifications or missing documents enable teams to address gaps proactively and ensures audit readiness.
Compliance Overview: Proactive Monitoring of Compliance Risks
The platform centralizes all supplier and product documents—from certifications to inspection results—into a single, automated repository. Beyond storage, it provides real-time visibility into documents nearing expiration or requiring updates, flagging urgent compliance gaps. By aggregating up-to-date supplier and product data, as well as compliance metrics, the platform pinpoints vulnerabilities like high-risk suppliers or unmet obligations. With this clarity, businesses can prioritize corrective actions, align operations with suppliers or buyers, and demonstrate robust due diligence to auditors—maintaining seamless compliance across the supply chain.
Seamless Request For Risk-Adverse Management
Leveraging compliance insights, the platform enables tailored certificate requests aligned with your risk tolerance. For example, high-risk suppliers or products without recent inspections can be prioritized for urgent document updates.
With real-time tracking of request statuses (e.g., pending, in progress &awaiting review), your team gains full visibility into supplier responsiveness.
This helps teams to:
Anticipate Delays – Spot stalled requests early and take action to prevent bottlenecks.
Prevent Document Expiry – Get automatic alerts for expiring certificates and trigger timely renewals.
Ensure Audit Readiness – Maintain a clear record of requests, submissions, and approvals to demonstrate compliance.
Want to know more details?
Discover Dole Use Case
Many businesses in the food supply chain struggle with compliance management. One of Agriplace’s clients, Dole UK, a leading fruit producers and manufacturer, faced challenges in managing supplier certifications and audit documentation. After adopting Agriplace, they successfully streamlined compliance processes, reduced administrative workload, and improved audit readiness. Their experience highlights the growing need for digital solutions in compliance management.
Final Thoughts
Compliance audits in the food and beverage industry are becoming more complex, requiring companies to adopt smarter, more efficient compliance management solutions. Agriplace helps businesses navigate these challenges by simplifying documentation, automating supplier verification, and ensuring audit readiness.
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