Top SQF Edition 10 audit questions
SQF Edition 10 is more than a code update. It reshapes what counts as proof of competency and how the audit itself is conducted. For teams who live with the standard every day, that raises plenty of good questions.
We heard many of them during the SQF Edition 10 webinar, “How to prepare for your SQF Edition 10 audit”. Below are the ones attendees asked most, which also matches what I hear most often across the industry.
A lot of these answers trace back to how Edition 10 was developed, and I had a seat at the table when Edition 10 was written. I served on the working group behind Part A, the section that defines how audits are conducted. I’m also an SQF lead auditor. Before that, I worked as a regulator, buyer, manufacturer, and trainer.
Here’s what I’d tell someone heading into their SQF Edition 10 audit.
Key takeaways
- Practitioner rules: Only your primary SQF practitioner must be employed at the site; the backup can be corporate or a consultant.
- Culture proof: Set measurable food safety standards, report them annually, and expect auditors to interview your people.
- Vertical audits: The auditor picks one food safety plan and follows it through interviews, traceability, and records.
Under SQF Edition 10, only the primary SQF practitioner must be employed at the site, and the backup can work elsewhere. Earlier editions left room for confusion here. People continually asked whether someone from corporate, or even a consultant, could serve as the backup.
Edition 10 settles it. The employment requirement applies to the primary alone. That means your backup can be a corporate food safety lead, a colleague based elsewhere, or potentially an outside SQF consultant. Your primary still needs to be on site and on your payroll.
Two ways: the standards you set and the people auditors talk to.
First, Edition 10 asks your site to set food safety performance standards. Pick measures you can track, such as training completed on time, corrective actions closed on schedule, or target results on specific employee survey questions. Report those results to your management team at least once a year during management review.
Second, auditors will interview employees during the audit. They’ll look for evidence of the culture activities you’ve committed to, including recognition, engagement, and communication that follows the schedule your program defines. What your plan says on paper has to show up in how your people talk about their work.
In Edition 9, change management centered on new product development. Edition 10 widens the lens to the process itself. New products still count. So do changes to formulas, ingredients, suppliers, production equipment, labels, and packaging. My rule of thumb: any significant change touching how the product gets made belongs in your change management process.
The risk assessment isn’t a separate trigger. It lives inside change management. Every time a change enters the process, the assessment asks one question. Does this change introduce new hazards, affect existing ones, or alter the food safety plan as it’s currently written? If the answer is yes, your plan needs to reflect it.
To be ready for an SQF Edition 10 vertical audit, name a separate person to run the traceability exercise alongside the person managing the audit, because both happen at the same time.
The day opens the way it does now, with an opening meeting. The auditor confirms your scope of certification and the number of food safety plans in your facility.
Here’s the shift. The auditor then selects one of those plans and makes it the focus for the rest of the audit. That plan determines who gets interviewed, where the traceability exercise happens, and which records get reviewed.
That’s why staffing matters. The traceability exercise runs while the rest of the audit continues, and one person can’t cover both.
Under Edition 10 scoring, every certified site still receives a score. What changes is the rating. Every certified site gets the same one: C.
That matters most to customers. If your supplier approval program requires an E or G rating, that requirement no longer separates one site from another. Customers who want to hold suppliers to more than maintaining certification will need to build those expectations around the score instead.
The certificate won’t show the score, either. It confirms certification and nothing more. To see how a supplier performed, customers will need to request the audit report and review it.
This is one of the biggest departures from Edition 9. Edition 10 requires an assessment for all training the standard calls for. A signature on an SOP, or on an agenda showing someone attended a session, won’t be enough anymore. Auditors will expect to see passing assessment results.
They’ll also verify competency in person. During interviews, auditors will check whether employees understand the topics they’ve been trained on. Assessment records show the knowledge on paper. Interviews show it holds up on the floor. You need both, and it’s worth reviewing your SQF training requirements with that in mind.
Start with your internal auditor. My first recommendation is to send the person you’ve named for internal audits through an internal auditor training session. There’s a lot of good guidance in those sessions on how to run the audit well.
Then mirror what the certification auditor will do. Pick one process and work outward to everything that feeds it. For a single line, that means asking questions like these:
Suppliers. Are the suppliers for this line’s ingredients approved, and do we have their documentation?
People. Do the employees running this line have current training records and passing assessments?
Sanitation. What sanitation standard operating procedures (SSOPs) cover this equipment?
Maintenance. What preventive work is scheduled, what reactive work has been done, and is the paperwork complete?
Change. Has this line added equipment or products, and did those go through change management?
Receiving and shipping. Are the raw material and finished product records for this line in order?
Each answer pulls another part of your system into view. That network around a single food safety plan is the whole premise of a vertically integrated audit.
You don’t have to take on your SQF Edition 10 audit alone
Edition 10 asks more of your team at nearly every turn: broader change management, assessed training, and an audit that follows one plan through your whole system. Most SQF practitioners carry that load with a small team and a full production schedule.
That’s where an outside set of eyes can be really valuable. A consultant who knows the standard can run your vertical internal audit, pressure test your food safety culture plan, and spot issues before your certification auditor does. Edition 10 even allows that consultant to serve as your backup practitioner.
If you’re not sure where to begin, start with a free 30-minute consultation. Book your free readiness consultation here.
