Best Practices for IFS Food Standards Compliance
Two sites can own the same procedures and finish an IFS audit twenty points apart. Difference usually lies in habits: one site checks, records, and corrects as routine; another performs for audits. Best practice in IFS compliance is therefore less about secret techniques and more about consistent behaviours that make good evidence a natural by-product of good work.
IFS Food is owned by IFS Management GmbH, benchmarked by GFSI, and currently at version 8. Grades run A to D, passing sites achieve Foundation or Higher level at around 75 percent or more, and a D on a knock-out requirement fails the audit. Habits below protect both the score and, more importantly, the product.
Make monitoring impossible to fake and easy to do
Place monitoring where the work happens, with calibrated instruments within reach and record forms or terminals at the point of use. Supervisors should review critical control point records within a defined short period, not at the end of the week, so deviations are caught while product can still be held.
Rotate verification. A second person periodically re-checks temperatures, detector challenges, and label accuracy, and records the verification separately. When monitoring and verification are done by different eyes, errors surface early and records gain credibility with auditors.
Treat deviations as information
Sites with strong cultures log more deviations than weak sites, not fewer, because staff are not afraid to report. Handle each deviation the same way: hold affected product, assess safety, decide disposition with named authority, find root cause, act on the cause, and check the action worked. File the whole story together so an auditor can follow it in one place.
Trend your deviations monthly. Repeated small failures at the same step — a seal temperature drifting, a printer misreading dates — are a system asking for maintenance, retraining, or redesign. Fixing the pattern once beats correcting the same incident ten times, and trend evidence impresses auditors because it shows a system that learns.
A simple daily and weekly rhythm
- Daily: pre-start hygiene and equipment checks, record review by supervisors
- Weekly: glass and brittle plastic checks, pest device review, calibration due list
- Monthly: trend review of deviations, complaints, and test results
- Quarterly: traceability exercise, supplier performance review, internal audit block
Keep allergen and label control boringly strict
Allergen failures cause recalls out of proportion to their frequency. Schedule production to minimise changeovers, validate cleaning between allergen profiles, and verify the first packs off the line after every changeover and label roll change. Two-person label checks feel slow until you compare them with the cost of a recall.
Control obsolete labels and packaging physically. Locked storage, counted issue, and destruction records for superseded material prevent the classic error of correct product in last month’s packaging. Apply the same discipline to rework: identify it, record its allergen and traceability status, and use it only where the recipe permits.
Audit yourself harder than the auditor will
Plan internal audits across the whole standard over the year, mixing system audits with unannounced hygiene inspections and shift-based checks, including nights if you run them. Use auditors from outside the area audited, train them, and give findings real deadlines and owners.
Close findings with root-cause thinking, not cosmetic fixes. “Staff reminded” is rarely a root-cause action. Ask why the error was possible: unclear procedure, missing tool, unrealistic time, poor layout. Change the condition and similar findings stop appearing across departments, which is exactly what external auditors sample for when deciding whether a lapse is isolated or systemic.
Prepare people, not just files
Before an audit, brief staff honestly: auditors will ask what you do, why, and what you do when it goes wrong; answer from your real practice, and say if you do not know and would ask a supervisor. Coached, scripted answers collapse under a follow-up question and damage trust in everything else the site says.
Keep the factory audit-ready by routine, not by campaign. A weekly walk by a senior manager with a short checklist, findings logged and closed like internal audit points, maintains standards without panic. When the audit is unannounced — an option IFS programmes include — such a site simply opens the door.
Finally, use your audit report as a work plan. Address findings in order of risk, update your hazard analysis and procedures where the auditor exposed weak thinking, and show your customer a closed, verified action plan promptly. Buyers remember sites that respond well to a finding far more favourably than sites that argue every point.
Supplier and customer habits deserve the same discipline as internal ones. Review supplier performance data on schedule, visit or audit high-risk suppliers as your risk assessment requires, and close certificates and questionnaires before they expire rather than during your own audit. On the customer side, respond to complaints and technical queries with the same root-cause rigour you apply internally, and keep specifications and portal information current. Auditors sample these external loops too, and a site that is meticulous inside the factory but casual with supplier files or complaint replies presents an uneven picture that invites deeper sampling in exactly those weaker areas.
Key points
- Put monitoring at the point of work, review records fast, and verify with a second pair of eyes.
- Log deviations without blame, hold product, find root cause, and trend repeats monthly.
- Keep allergen changeovers, label checks, obsolete packaging, and rework under strict, simple controls.
- Internal audits and hygiene inspections should be tougher and more frequent than external audit sampling.
- Brief staff to answer from real practice, keep the site audit-ready by routine, and turn the audit report into a work plan.
