Kiwa ASI Food Safety Consulting Services

A food safety consultant helps a food business build and maintain the food safety programs that regulations, customers and certification standards require. That includes gap analyses against a standard, writing or updating HACCP and FSMA food safety plans, GFSI manuals and SOPs, preparing for audits and inspections, and training staff. Kiwa ASI's consultants work through ASI Training and Consulting, LLC, separately from our certification body.

It depends on the standard, and the two companies stay strictly separate. Consulting is delivered by ASI Training and Consulting, LLC, which is kept apart from our accredited certification body, ASI Food Safety, LLC, as ISO/IEC 17065 requires. Anyone who consulted on your system is kept out of auditing it and out of its certification decision. For management-system schemes such as FSSC 22000, accreditation rules call for a two-year gap before a related certification body certifies a system its sister company consulted on. Tell us about any consulting when you request a certification quote. You're always free to choose any accredited certification body.

No. No consultant can guarantee an audit result, and our consulting terms say so. Consulting is advisory: your team makes the decisions, implements the system and runs it every day. Auditors judge the evidence they find against the standard, and using Kiwa ASI consultants doesn't make certification easier, faster or cheaper with any certification body, including ours. What consulting can do is help you find and close gaps before your audit.

HACCP, SQF, BRCGS, FSSC 22000, IFS, cGMP and cGAP. We also help with FDA requirements under FSMA, such as preventive controls food safety plans and food defense plans, and with GFSI requirements such as food fraud vulnerability assessments and food safety culture plans.

A gap analysis compares your current food safety program with the requirements of a specific standard or regulation, such as SQF, BRCGS, FSSC 22000 or FDA's preventive controls rule, and lists what's missing, incomplete or not yet working. It's usually the first step of a consulting project: it shows what to fix, in what order, and how much work is left before your audit.

Start with the current edition of your standard and a gap analysis against it. Then build or update your food safety management system and prerequisite programs, train your team (SQF, for example, requires an SQF practitioner who has completed HACCP training), keep records long enough to show the system works (SQFI recommends at least 90 days before a first audit) and run an internal or mock audit before the real one. Our consultants can support each step. The certification audit itself is carried out by your certification body.

It depends on what you make and who regulates you. Most FDA-registered food facilities need a written food safety plan under the preventive controls rule (21 CFR Part 117), prepared or overseen by a preventive controls qualified individual (PCQI). Seafood and juice processors follow FDA's HACCP regulations (21 CFR Parts 123 and 120), and USDA-inspected meat and poultry plants follow 9 CFR Part 417; each requires a written HACCP plan when a hazard is reasonably likely to occur. GFSI standards such as SQF and BRCGS also require HACCP-based food safety plans. We offer PCQI training and HACCP training for the people who write and run them.

Under FDA's Intentional Adulteration rule (21 CFR Part 121), most FDA-registered facilities that manufacture or process food need a written food defense plan: a vulnerability assessment, mitigation strategies, and food defense monitoring, corrective action and verification procedures. The rule exempts very small businesses (which must be able to show they qualify), holding food other than in liquid storage tanks, and packing or labeling where the container that touches the food stays intact. GFSI-benchmarked standards such as SQF, BRCGS and FSSC 22000 also require food defense. See our food defense training.

It's a documented review of how vulnerable your raw materials, ingredients and packaging are to fraud for economic gain, such as substitution, dilution, counterfeiting or mislabeling, followed by a mitigation plan for the risks you find. GFSI-benchmarked standards require one (for example SQF 2.7.2, BRCGS 5.4 and FSSC 22000 2.5.4), and FDA's preventive controls rule requires your hazard analysis to consider hazards that may be intentionally introduced for economic gain (21 CFR 117.130). See our food fraud training.

A food safety culture plan sets out how senior management will build and measure a culture in which everyone takes ownership of food safety, with objectives, communication, training, employee feedback and a way to track progress. Food safety culture has been part of GFSI benchmarking since 2020: SQF requires senior management to lead and support it, BRCGS requires a defined plan to develop and improve food safety and quality culture, and FSSC 22000 requires culture objectives backed by a documented plan. See our food safety culture training.

Both. Document development and reviews are typically remote. Gap analyses, sanitary design assessments and readiness checks usually include time on-site.

It depends on where you start, and a gap analysis gives you a realistic timeline. Plan for implementation time as well as writing: your system has to run long enough to produce records. SQFI, for example, recommends at least 90 days of records before a first certification audit, so a site building a GFSI system from scratch usually needs several months.

Projects are scoped and quoted individually based on the services selected, facility size and time on-site. Use the form above or call 1 (800) 477-0778 to get a quote.

Setup builds a plan, manual or SOP set where none exists. Review and maintenance keeps an existing program current with standard updates, regulatory changes and your own process changes, through scheduled reviews.

Yes. ASI Training and Consulting, LLC also runs live online food safety courses, including HACCP, PCQI, Implementing SQF Systems, internal auditing, food defense and food safety culture, plus on-site training for your team. Many clients pair a consulting project with training for the people who will own the program.