The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) has released the first edition of its Food Safety Auditor Competencies on the GFSI website (www.mygfsi.com), which is available for download by any interested stakeholders. The framework was developed over three years by the multidisciplinary GFSI auditor competence working group, which was mandated by the GFSI board to define generic food-safety auditor competencies underpinning GFSI benchmarked schemes, and the mechanisms by which they can be assessed and verified.
The competency framework comprises a list of agreed generic knowledge and skill components that can be applied across all post farm-gate GFSI benchmarked schemes. The framework will be re-released in early 2014 to include competencies for the pre-farm-gate sector. Further competencies will be added as other sector-specific GFSI Technical Working groups (the Food Broker/Agents Working Group, the Retail/Wholesale Working Group and others) draft the requirements for their particular industry scopes.