The FPA-SAFE programme was designed by leading food companies to meet the global food industry's audit needs, including packaging manufacture.

FPA-SAFE provides a reliable, comprehensive assessment of a company's entire food quality and safety system while reducing the time and expenses associated with redundant supplier audits.

Instead of each company relying on or imposing its own audit and audit checklist on suppliers, these companies have agreed to a single, comprehensive, annual audit that is widely accepted across the industry. As a result, a single FPA-SAFE audit will satisfy the audit requirements of several customers, eliminating the need for costly, disruptive, and often duplicative audits, saving both time and money.

What is the FPA-SAFE programme?
The fundamental characteristic of the SAFE audit is that there are no requirements, other than that the facility does not produce adulterated or illegal products. The SAFE auditor reviews your policies and procedures and your actual practices, and provides that information in the report as an objective "virtual tour" of your quality systems.

The auditor also provides his/her opinion, or "judgment", of the overall effectiveness of each system. Then it is up to your customers to read the report and determine for themselves whether your quality systems meet their expectations.

Two different checklists are available for food products and packaging products. The checklists are divided into five categories: Management Responsibility, Fundamentals, HACCP and Food Safety Systems, Quality Systems, and Regulatory Considerations.

FPA-SAFE auditors do not score the audits, but a “scoring” option is available to your customers. It assigns a value to the auditor’s judgments and calculates a “Quick Score” based on an equal weighting of all 36 audit sections.

Where do I go from here?
Your first step is to prepare for an audit.