Service Scheme for Food Export to

Europe BRC Food Certification

BRC is the most effective permit if your products are intended to be sold in the British or European stores. To meet the development need of the food industry, British Retail Consortium (BRC), British retail group, certification body, royal laboratory and academic body jointly set the BRC Food Technical Standard to evaluate the suppliers of the retailers in 1998. This standard is rapidly used as the industry standard by relevant organizations of each country within a very short time. It is a milestone authoritative standard in the global food industry till now. Therefore, BRC is one of the certification standards recognized by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI).

Enterprises and suppliers holding BRC certificates can prove to their customers that their products conform to a high standard in aspects of safety, quality and legality. It is not only the evaluation standard of global retail suppliers, but also widely used by many well-known enterprises to audit and evaluate their suppliers and production plants. Presently, most British and many European large-scale retailers, such as Tesco, Starbucks, Asda Stores, Burger King, McDonald’s, KFC, John Lewis and Germany Metro, require the products of foreign suppliers to pass the BRC certification, so as to guarantee the quality of the products. Many members of RILA, such as Walmark, Nike, Apple, Ikea, Best Buy, Staples, Target and JC Penney, also adopt the BRC standards to measure the quality of the suppliers.

With the globally wide application of the BRC standards, the BRC organization develops and perfects them to multi-industry standards, enabling a wider application. Presently, the BRC standards consist of the following four major standards: BRC Global Standard for Food Safety (the seventh edition since July 1, 2015), BRC Global Standard for Packaging and Packaging Materials (the fifth edition since January 2016); BRC Consumer Products Standard (the fourth edition at present); BRC Standard for Storage and Distribution (the second edition at present) and BRC Global Standard for Agents and Brokers.

Since the requirements of the BRC standards are high, if small and medium sized enterprises want to pass the certification for the first time, assisting by a professional counselor is the best method that can save the cost and meet the standard requirements. Professional early-stage counseling will be completed within three months in general. Presently, audit can only be conducted by foreign-funded enterprises. Since the BRC certificate shall be approved by the headquarters, the applicant can obtain the certificate at about one month after having passed the site audit and submitted the complete report on nonconforming item correction. Therefore, enterprises applying for the BRC certificate shall consider the early-stage counseling time and the time required to obtain the certificate, so as to provide the certificate within the time specified by the customers.

Quotation Scheme for Food Export to Europe 

Quotation principle

The quotation for the BRC food certification is based on the scope of enterprise declaration and the scale of enterprise, and is usually subject to the number of person-days. The factors that determine the number of person-days include:

1) Number of employees;

2) Scope of BRC activities declared by the enterprise;

3) Country to which the product is intended to be sold.