BRCGS Supplier Approval Without the Bottleneck: Free Tools First, Questionnaires Last

By Robert Low, Director, Lead Auditor & BRCGS Approved Trainer

Supplier approval is genuinely important. Your materials, components and packaging carry risk into your products, and a risk-based approval system is rightly a core expectation of BRCGS standards. But I want to be honest about the state of the practice, because supplier approval has become one of the biggest bottlenecks in the industry, and most of the delay is self-inflicted.

The Bottleneck Nobody Talks About

Look at it from the supplier’s side. A decent-sized supplier receives hundreds of questionnaire requests a week, every one demanding the same certificates, the same policies, the same answers in a slightly different format. Your forty-page questionnaire joins a queue behind everyone else’s forty-page questionnaire, and your approval sits pending for months. Meanwhile your production planning waits, your new product launch waits, and the information you eventually receive is mostly things you could have verified yourself in minutes. The questionnaire has become a ritual, and rituals are slow.

The Faster Sequence: Verify, Then Read, Then Ask

Step one, free verification tools. Start with what is publicly checkable. The BRCGS Directory shows you a supplier’s live certification status, scope, grade and expiry. UKAS CertCheck verifies certificates issued under UK accreditation, and other national accreditation bodies offer equivalents. Two minutes, zero emails, and you have independently confirmed the single most load-bearing fact in your approval: a valid, in-scope certificate from an accredited body. As I argued in what customers should ask certificated suppliers for, verify the certificate, do not collect it.

Step two, the supplier’s website and public information. Certifications held, sites, capabilities, recall history in the public domain. Ten more minutes fills most of the remaining picture.

Step three, a questionnaire, targeted, only if needed. Whatever genuine gaps remain after steps one and two, ask about those and only those. For a certificated supplier that might be a page: specification agreement, change and incident notification, allergen and sensitising material handling. Save the long-form questionnaire for uncertificated suppliers where it is doing real work. Your approval turnaround drops from months to days, and your suppliers stop dreading your emails.

The Bigger Fix I Am Working On

The real solution is structural: suppliers maintaining one verified, central profile, certificates and questionnaire answers in one place, shared with every customer that needs it, instead of answering the same questions hundreds of times. I am developing exactly that, a global supplier hub with certificates and questionnaires centralised for suppliers. It is a work in progress, and I am talking to suppliers and customers about what it needs to do. If that is a problem you live with, from either side, I would genuinely like to hear from you.

And if your current approval system needs rebuilding on risk-based lines in the meantime, conditional questionnaires and all, that is a system I have built many times over. Buttons below.