BRCGS Audit Grades Explained: AA to D and the Plus Grades

By Robert Low, Lead Management System Specialist and BRCGS Approved Trainer

Every BRCGS certification audit ends in a grade, and that grade follows your site around commercially for the next year. Retailer technologists screen on it, customer questionnaires ask for it, and some customers set minimum grade requirements in their supplier approval criteria. So it is worth understanding exactly how BRCGS audit grades work.

The Grading Scale

Grades run from AA at the top, through A, B and C, down to D. The grade is driven by the number and severity of non-conformities raised during the audit. A handful of minors keeps you in the top grades. As minors accumulate, or majors appear, the grade steps down, and beyond defined thresholds the outcome is no certificate at all. The exact thresholds are set out in each standard’s protocol, and for Consumer Products Issue 5 the final protocol tables arrive with the published standard in October 2026.

The Plus Grades

Sites that opt into voluntary unannounced auditing receive their grade with a plus: AA+ down to D+. The plus signals to customers that the grade was earned without notice, no weeks of preparation, no site polished for a known date. In my experience the plus carries genuine commercial weight with retailers, precisely because everyone in the industry knows the difference between a site that is always audit ready and a site that gets audit ready. I said as much in my Issue 5 consultation feedback, where my personal view was that the scheme would benefit from going further with unannounced auditing rather than leaving it purely voluntary.

What Actually Drives Your Grade

Three things, in my experience as an auditor. First, the health of your internal audit programme, because a site that finds and fixes its own issues presents few for the auditor to raise. Second, evidence discipline: records complete, signed, dated and retrievable, since a good system with poor records still generates non-conformities. Third, the Fundamentals. A major non-conformity against a Fundamental requirement does not just cost you grade positions, it costs you the certificate, which is why I always tell sites to build their internal audit priorities around the Fundamentals first. I have written about the Fundamental requirements and their consequences separately.

Grades and the Issue 5 Transition

Transition audits are where grades historically dip, because sites carry old habits into new requirements. If your first Issue 5 audit lands in 2027, the way to protect your grade is a proper gap analysis against the final standard and at least one internal audit cycle before the certification body arrives. My article on the audit options available under BRCGS covers how the announced, unannounced and blended routes differ.