For a restaurant, food safety is a hygiene rating: an environmental health officer visits, and you get a score out of five. For a business supplying a supermarket, a wholesaler or a contract caterer, that isn't nearly enough. Your buyer will require a recognised third-party certification, and they'll require it before they'll place an order.
Which certification depends on who you're selling to and how big you are. And the building you produce in decides, before you've cooked anything, how hard that certification is going to be to get.
This is the part operators tend to discover late: audit-readiness isn't only about your paperwork and your process. It's built into the premises. A space that wasn't designed for it can make certification slow, expensive, or in some cases impossible without physical changes. So it's worth understanding what these standards actually ask of a building before you commit to one.
The two standards, and which one you need
Most UK producers encounter one of two schemes, and they sit at different levels.
SALSA (Safe and Local Supplier Approval) is the entry point. It's a UK scheme built specifically for small and micro producers, run as a non-profit by the Food and Drink Federation, the NFU and UK Hospitality. It's designed to be affordable and proportionate for a smaller business, and it's what many supermarkets, wholesalers and caterers accept from local and smaller suppliers. If you're moving from selling direct to supplying a professional buyer for the first time, SALSA is usually the standard that opens the door.
BRCGS (the Global Standard for Food Safety) is the higher bar. Now in its ninth issue, it's a globally recognised, GFSI-benchmarked standard, and it's what the major retailers require from suppliers at scale. It's more demanding, more detailed and more expensive to certify against than SALSA, and it's the standard a manufacturer supplying a national multiple will almost certainly need.
What both standards actually ask of a building
Whatever the scheme, the requirements rest on the same foundation, and a good deal of it is physical.
HACCP is the backbone. Both standards are built on HACCP: a documented system that identifies where hazards can enter your process and puts controls at those points. It's a management system, not a building feature, but the building has to make it possible to actually operate the controls the plan calls for.
Beneath that, the recurring physical themes are these:
Layout and product flow. Issue 9 of BRCGS puts specific weight on factory layout, the flow of processes, and how space is used to prevent contamination. In practice this means a clean, one-directional flow from raw materials through to finished product, without raw and ready-to-eat crossing paths. For clients that require it, we build exactly that: a completely circular flow through the unit, with two doors so nothing doubles back on itself. Goods are taken out of their delivery packaging on arrival, washed, and repacked into the operator's own containers, so nothing from the outside world travels into the clean production area. And refuse leaves by its own protected route, so waste never crosses the path of finished product.
Zoning and segregation. High-risk and low-risk activities need separating physically, which means walls, doors and dedicated areas, not a line on the floor. Where a client's certification calls for it, that extends well beyond the production space itself: a dedicated internal kitchen porter area, and in some cases a second kitchen porter station outside the unit so the operator doesn't share wash-up facilities with anyone. For one contract caterer client we built an entirely separate changing space, with their own lockers and toilet facilities, because their standard required it.
Allergen management. One of the hardest things to control and one auditors scrutinise closely. Preventing cross-contamination between allergen and non-allergen production is partly procedure, but it's also physical: the segregation, dedicated areas and controlled flow described above are exactly what makes it possible. The circular-flow, unbox-and-repack, protected-refuse setup isn't only about hygiene in general, it's the infrastructure that lets an operator prove allergen control to an auditor.
Ventilation, surfaces and the fabric of the building. Some clients require their own separate ventilation system, which we've fitted. Alongside that: hygienic wall cladding, the right flooring, drainage that runs the correct way for cleaning and wash-down, and sealed, cleanable surfaces throughout. This is exactly the stuff that's expensive and disruptive to retrofit into a unit that wasn't built for it, and straightforward to have from the start.
Why the building decides how hard the audit is
Here's the point that a manufacturer weighing where to produce should take away.
You can have an excellent HACCP plan, rigorous procedures and a well-trained team, and still struggle with certification if the premises fight you. If raw and finished product have to share a corridor, if there's nowhere to properly separate allergen work, if the drainage runs the wrong way, if the surfaces can't be cleaned to standard, then you're either failing findings or spending heavily to physically change the building.
Conversely, producing in a space built and maintained to commercial production standard, with the flow, zoning, surfaces and cold chain already right, means the building is helping you pass rather than holding you back. Your certification work becomes about your process and your documentation, which is where it should be, rather than about fixing the premises underneath you.
This is the part worth being precise about, because it's where we can help and where we can't. We don't run your certification for you, that's your audit, your HACCP plan, your documentation. What we do is build and adapt the unit to whatever your certification requires, and we've done it repeatedly for clients among them McDonald's, Compass Group and Vegan Pattie Lady. If your standard calls for a specific flow, a separate ventilation system, dedicated welfare facilities or an external goods-in cold store, we make the physical changes needed to achieve it. You bring the standard; we make sure the building can meet it.
What this means if you're scaling towards retail
For a manufacturer, the decision of where to produce and the decision of which buyers you can win are the same decision, because your buyers won't engage without the certification, and your certification depends in part on your space.
Starting in a production facility that's already built to standard lets you reach SALSA, and then BRCGS, without first having to build or rebuild a compliant facility yourself. You can prove your product and win the buyer from a space that already clears the bar, then decide whether a dedicated facility is worth it once you know the demand is real. Which is a far less risky order than committing to a build, discovering at audit what it's missing, and paying to put it right.
Producing for retail or wholesale, or getting there? Talk to us about what audit-ready production requires →
