What are the benefits of BRCGS certification for food manufacturers?
A potential customer calls. They like your product. They like the price.
But before anything gets signed off, they need to see a current BRCGS certificate.
No certificate, no order. It’s as simple as that.
Not holding BRCGS certification can mean missing out on new sales and opportunities. That’s because most major retailers and brand owners treat it as a baseline requirement for their suppliers. Without it, you won’t get as far as a conversation about your product.
BRCGS has been the reference standard in food manufacturing for more than 25 years. It’s now on its ninth issue and covers over 22,000 certified sites across more than 130 countries. It’s one of the first things many buyers look for on a new supplier’s paperwork.
This blog explains what BRCGS certification is, why it’s important and how it can benefit your food manufacturing business.
What is BRCGS?
BRCGS (formerly known as the British Retail Consortium Global Standard) is a certification scheme covering food safety, packaging, storage and distribution across the supply chain.
For food manufacturers, the relevant standard is the BRCGS Food Safety Global Standard. It sets out requirements across areas including HACCP-based food safety planning, quality management systems, site standards, product and process control and working practices.
Certification is awarded following an announced or unannounced audit carried out by an accredited, independent certification body. Certificates are typically valid for 12 months, so manufacturers are re-audited annually to keep it.
BRCGS certification is typically required for food manufacturers, co-packers and contract packers, private label suppliers, export-focused food businesses and companies supplying UK supermarkets.
It’s especially important for businesses looking to scale into retail or large-scale distribution.
The combination of detailed technical standards, independent auditing and regular reassessment gives buyers confidence in what the certificate represents.
While BRCGS accreditation isn’t mandatory in the UK, it’s required by most major supermarkets and retail chains as a condition of supply. Without it, many food and drink manufacturers find it difficult to secure or maintain retail contracts.
Opening doors with retailers and brand owners
Most UK food retailers, foodservice operations and brand owners view BRCGS certification as a non-negotiable part of onboarding a new food supplier. If you can’t produce a valid certificate, you probably won’t get your foot in the door, regardless of how good your product is or how competitive your pricing is.
Holding a valid BRCGS certificate also means you won’t need to undergo a separate supplier audit for each retailer or brand you work with. If you’re certified, that’s generally enough to satisfy their requirements.
However, certification isn’t a guarantee that you’ll automatically win new business once you have it. Many food manufacturers go into the process expecting orders to follow once their certificate is on the wall. They often don’t. All certification does is remove a block. It stops food safety credentials from being the reason why a potential buyer says no. You’ll still need to put the work in to win the account.
This is where preparation matters, and where we spend most of our time at Beacon Compliance. We help food manufacturers get audit-ready without the process grinding production to a halt.
Understanding the grading system
BRCGS audits don’t just produce a pass or fail. They produce a grade, either AA, A, B, C, D or Uncertified.
The grade you get will depend on the number and severity of non-conformities the auditor finds.
AA is the top tier, allowing no more than five minor non-conformities. A critical non-conformity is an instant fail, regardless of how well everything else performed.
The grading system is one of the more distinctive parts of BRCGS compared with other food safety certifications. It gives manufacturers something concrete to work towards once the certificate is secured, as it’s a score you can improve, year on year, and put to commercial use.
Buyers reference it in their supplier scorecards, tender responses and account reviews. As such, a manufacturer holding an AA grade will be in a much stronger position than a competitor scraping through at a C or D.
Meeting global food safety standards
BRCGS was the first standard to achieve GFSI (Global Food Safety Initiative) benchmarking, and it’s recognised across more than 130 countries. It functions as a shared language between manufacturers and buyers that would otherwise have no consistent way of assessing each other’s competence in food safety.
If you’re a UK manufacturer with export ambitions, this matters in a very practical way. Instead of proving food safety country by country and buyer by buyer, a BRCGS certificate does that work across every market that recognises it. The same applies to manufacturers supplying multinational brand owners, who typically apply the same sourcing standards across every country they buy from. A single certificate meets that requirement everywhere at once. There’s no need to re-prove it for each relationship, or each time a new market or buyer comes into the picture.
The cost of getting it wrong
UK food product recalls rose to 141 in 2025, up 23% on the 115 recorded in 2024. Allergen labelling errors were the single biggest cause, accounting for roughly a quarter of all recalls. Listeria was the second most common cause, at around 10% of events, while contamination from foreign bodies like glass, metal or plastic was the third major category in the FSA’s analysis.
BRCGS exists to help prevent the failures behind these figures.
The standard’s allergen management requirements map directly onto the leading causes of UK product recalls. Its traceability requirements help manufacturers isolate affected batches in hours, not days. And its product control requirements, covering process hygiene and detecting foreign bodies, target the third-largest cause of product recalls head-on.
A recall can cost more than the product being written off. There’s the risk of being delisted, which can be harder to recover from than the recall itself. There’s the reputational damage, which for a smaller manufacturer can take years to shift. And there’s the cost of the investigation, tracing the root cause, notifying the FSA and managing the retailer relationship through it. While holding BRCGS certification won’t eliminate the risk of any of these things happening, it can substantially reduce the odds that they do.
How Beacon Compliance can help you achieve BRCGS certification
Achieving BRCGS certification can open a lot of doors for your food business.
It can improve your access to commercial opportunities, reduce risk, strengthen your position in tenders and account reviews, and give your business credibility that travels across the export markets.
However, BRCGS is a detailed standard and preparing for certification without support can be a long, drawn-out process that could result in a failed audit if you don’t understand its expectations and how they apply to your operations.
At Beacon Compliance, we can help you get audit-ready with confidence. Our team brings decades of combined industry experience working with food manufacturers across the UK.
We can provide structured technical support to ensure you’re prepared, including a pre-audit gap analysis, documentation review, mock audits and staff training to embed your new systems and processes across your organisation.
So, if you’re preparing for BRCGS certification or feel your current approach to it isn’t as effective as it could be, get in touch to book a free consultation with our team to learn how we can help.
