IFS Broker – Your ticket-to-trade in the food sector

IFS Broker is a standard recognized by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) for auditing food brokers, trade agencies, and importers.

Obtaining food, its raw materials and ingredients takes place in increasingly complex ways and from a wide variety of sources. Brokers, trading agencies, and importers are playing an increasingly important role in globalized supply chains, and are the links between producers and retailers.

As a food broker, trade agency or importer, you generally won't take physical possession of the food you trade. This makes it all the more important for you to implement appropriate processes so that food safety, quality, and legal requirements at your suppliers/products is established and compliance monitored.

Certification to the IFS Broker standard ensures that you have done everything necessary to ensure that the products supplied comply with legal requirements and contractual specifications. We support you along the way.

The IFS Broker standard also provides a reliable basis for strengthening existing and establishing new business relations. A further important factor is that trading partners want brokers and importers to communicate what they actually need from the growers' and producers' products, and that these requirements are both understood and complied with. In this sense, certification is therefore also your ticket-to-trade. We help you to verify the safety and quality of your processes. Create transparency and trust by working with us.

IFS Broker certification verifies that you have implemented appropriate measures to ensure that your suppliers operate in compliance with product safety and quality requirements. As a broker, trading agency, or importer, you are also required to ensure that the products supplied comply with legal and contract-specific requirements. We support you with our decades of experience and extensive expertise. We are your competent partner in obtaining certification according to IFS Broker. As an accredited and approved certification body, we guide you through the certification process for your processes and systems.

International Featured Standards (IFS) is a set of food, product and service standards designed to ensure that products and services meet specifications agreed with customers. In addition to IFS Broker, these include the standards IFS Food and IFS Logistics standards.

IFS meets the stringent requirements of, and is recognized by, the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI). GFSI does not define its own standards, but does recognize specific international standards on food safety and associated processes and management systems. In addition to the IFS, FSSC 22000 and BRCGS Global Standards are also GFSI-recognised. Manufacturers, Retailers, brokers and other actors in the food sector around the world trust the benchmark requirements of GFSI. Consequently, IFS Broker certification is a global ticket to trade in every sector of the world's food market.

Create transparency, safety, and trust in an end-to-end, globalized food supply chain. We support you by auditing and certifying your processes and management systems.

We are a partner who knows every relevant food safety standard worldwide and can professionally and efficiently certify your business. Your customer relations will then be secure for the long term. Benefit from our more than two decades of experience in the food sector and from top experts who know your industry. To enable you to fully focus on your core business, we continuously monitor the development of new standards for the global food sector.

We support you as a competent and reliable partner, starting with the question which standard is best suited to your company and your business model, through to preparation for the audit required for certification.

An additional benefit for you is entry in our Certipedia database that documents your transparency and high standards of safety and quality. This represents one further building block for gaining the trust of customers and business partners.

One partner for all certifications essential for success

As a globally active and experienced testing and certification organization, we are familiar with many other standards beyond food safety that play a role in the food industry. This gives you important added value. These standards include common audits according to ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 50001 as well as information security (ISO 27001, ISO 22301, ISO 20000), supply chain and CSR audits such as SMETA and SA 8000 and the palm oil certification RSPO. We are your partner for efficient certification also in areas such as environmental protection, occupational health and safety, energy management, and more.

In other words, we are a real one-stop shop for you to meet competent experts who possess profound knowledge of the industry and who speak your language.

Disclaimer: At TÜV Rheinland, the neutrality, objectivity, independency and impartiality of our activities are of utmost importance. Our assessment and audit activities follow these values in compliance with the applicable accreditation requirements. All the necessary structural, organizational and processual measures are in place in all levels of the organization in order to avoid conflicts of interest (e.g. rigorous separation of consultancy and certification) and to ensure impartiality. We do not offer or provide management system consultancy by an accredited certification body for management systems. Within the TR Group, we ensure a minimum 2-year interval between management system consultancy and certification activity for the same costumer.