The importance of audit planning for food safety cannot be underestimated. Not only is it important to allocate a budget for the audit itself, the cost of building and maintaining a food safety program should be accounted for as well. Generally, it costs more to build and maintain a food safety program than to undergo the certification process.
Food safety programs will include (but not limited to) Risk Assessments, HACCP Plans, SOPs, Logs, Employee Training, microbiological testing, etc. For starters, let’s talk about the cost of the food safety audits.
What’s the average cost of a food safety audit?
When looking at your quality assurance budget for the year, remember that there’s quite a difference in price for audits, depending on a variety of factors:
Non-certified GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) Audits, and GAP (Good Agricultural Practices) Audits are going to be less expensive than GFSI Certified audits like SQF, BRCGS, PrimusGFS, GlobalGAP etc. Each individual GFSI-benchmarked certification program varies in price based on the standard, and how long the audit takes to complete. PrimusGFS and GlobalGAP, two food safety standards for fruit and vegetable farms/facilities, typically only last one day. Comparatively, standards such as SQF, BRCGS, IFS and FSSC 22000 are 2-3 days in length which could impact the overall cost.
What other fees are involved with safety audits?
Once you know the auditing company or Certification Body (CB) that you plan to use, get a quote with the audit cost AND all the other fees and expenses that could be an additional 30%.
Some of the most widely used fees include:
Other than the audit itself, the next highest cost is the flight, hotel, rental car, and all other travel expenses for the auditor which also need to be paid by the auditee. This is why it's important to know where your auditor is based, and when they are set to arrive. Obviously, travel expenses will be higher if the only auditor available is far away, or if the audit is scheduled during the summer months when airfare is at an all-time high.
Most of the time there is no wiggle room in the price of the audit, but occasionally, the overall cost can be reduced by minimizing project inefficiencies relating to travel. For instance, if you have multiple facilities and/or farms that are close to each other, each location could be audited by the same auditor over a short duration. This could reduce travel expenses and the auditor may agree to take on the full project for a slightly lower fee due to convenience.
The Cost of Quality
After you’ve done all the necessary research to estimate your food safety budget for the year, it’s time for the hardest part – getting management on board with the cost of quality. Food safety audits are a great tool to gauge the success of your food safety program, but they do come with a price tag. However, this 4-5-figure price tag is much lower than what it would cost to recover from a 6-7-figure product recall. So if you are the food safety manager and trying to get buy-in from management for a particular food safety audit, explain that this is not only a great way to challenge your team and ensure continuous improvement, at the end of the day, it could save you millions of dollars in potentially lost product.
Curious about how to build your Food Safety budget for next year? Contact our team today – we’d be happy to help you and your team forecast the cost of quality! (info@asifood.com)