What's New?
At the Safe Quality Food Institute we are constantly evaluating our practices in an effort to better serve our customers and stakeholders. To this end, the SQF Institute will introduce a new audit report scoring system August 1st, 2010. The new system will, in many ways, be similar to our current system. There will be improvements that we wanted to share with you in advance.
The revision to the SQF Institute audit report scoring system will be more reflective of the actual content within a certification audit. For example, the new audit report scoring system will enable suppliers and buyers to see key differences among facilities and sites that are in need of ongoing analysis. Additionally, scores generated by the audit report system will be more reflective of the certification content and provide a proper rating for those facilities in need of a surveillance audit.
The changes in the scoring system include the increased weighing of serious non-conformances, specifically major and critical non-conformances. These ratings will move from -3 points to -25 and -4 points to -50 per question respectively. In addition, the new scoring system will weigh the non-conformances more significantly by removing the multiplication of the number of questions by 4 and simply using the total number of questions as the total points possible. Please see the samples below to see how an audit will be affected.
| Facility Performance | Current Scoring System | New Scoring System |
| SQF 2000 Level 3 Audit 1 Major non-conformance 12 Minor non-conformances 2 Opportunities for Improvement (OIP) |
Facility Rating: E Facility Score: 97.3% Surveillance audit required |
Facility Rating: C Facility Score: 80.5% Surveillance audit required |
| SQF 2000 Level 3 Audit 0 Major non-conformance 4 Minor non-conformance 3 Opportunities for Improvement (OIP) |
Facility Rating: E Facility Score: 99.0% |
Facility Rating: E Facility Score: 95.8% |
| SQF 2000 Level 3 Audit 2 Major non-conformance 3 Minor non-conformance 1 Opportunities for Improvement (OIP) |
Facility Rating: E Facility Score: 98.8% Surveillance audit required |
Facility Rating: C Facility Score: 78.2% Surveillance audit required |
As you can see from these examples, the issuance of a major non-conformance has a significant impact on the overall audit score in the new scoring system, where as in the current system, in spite of a significant difference in the audit results, the score was relatively unaffected. In the SQF system, a major non-conformance is a systematic failure of a SQF system program or a significant risk to food safety or product quality.
This change may result in a lower overall score for suppliers. We realize this may initially cause some concern among suppliers as they may wonder, "What will my customers think of a potentially lower score?" To minimize these perceptions, suppliers will be able to compare their new score against the score they would have received under the previous process as we will show the old score along with the new score on audit reports for 12 months after implementation of this change.
The SQF Institute is dedicated to educating our customers on the new scoring system and we will assist you as required, to help you navigate the new process. Contact us if you have any questions.
Several amendments have been made to the SQF 2000 Code after the approval of the SQFI Technical Advisory Council. Click here for a list of changes. Additionally, a new edition of the Food Sector Categories has been released.
To view all our SQF documents, click here.
Starting on Wednesday, July 21, the SQF Institute will be handling all customer support inquiries through either the main office in Washington, DC USA or our regional office located in Sydney, Australia.
If you have specific questions or inquiries regarding the SQF Quickfire system, which in the past you have sent directly to the Quickfire Support desk at support@muddyboots.biz, you will now be required to email SQFI directly with all inquires.