BRCGS Consumer Products Issue 5 Product Categories and Certificate Validity Explained

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

Two of the appendices in the new standard decide more about your audit than most people realise. One sets your product categories, which drives your scope and who is allowed to audit you. The other sets out how your certificate dates are calculated. Here is my plain English view of BRCGS Consumer Products Issue 5 product categories and certificate validity, with a simple way to check your own position. It is my interpretation of the published standard, so confirm anything specific with your certification body.

Product Categories Have Been Rebuilt

Categories now follow the technology and typical processes used to make a product, not what the product is called. There are ten, running from textiles and paper through to formulated chemicals, plastics and rubber, glass and ceramics, metal, electronics, wood and a category for assembly only sites.

The big change is that medical devices, games and toys no longer have separate categories. They are placed by how they are made. A plaster or cotton bandage sits with textiles. A medicated wound dressing sits with textiles and formulated chemical products. A blood pressure monitor sits with electronic equipment.

Your categories matter for two reasons. They define the activities on your certificate, and they decide which auditors are competent to audit you. If your products fall into more than one category, you and your certification body agree which ones apply, and the auditor needs approval in all of them. A product made from more than one material, such as a lampshade with metal and textile, can mean two categories at once.

Assembly only is its own category, for sites that make nothing and put bought-in finished components together, such as gift packing. One catch is food components. They must be pre-packaged. If you handle unpackaged food as part of the assembly, that activity falls outside this standard and would need a food safety standard instead.

How the Certificate Dates Work

Appendix 6 walks through the certificate cycle with examples. Here is the logic as I read it.

• The re-audit due date is twelve months from the first day of the previous audit. Announced audits can take place in the 28 days before that date.
• The voluntary unannounced option gives a wider window, the last four months before the due date, and you choose it within three months of your last audit.
• After an audit the site has a set number of days to submit corrective actions, root cause analysis and preventive actions. The maximum is 28 days for a re-certification audit and 90 days for an initial one.
• The certification body then has up to 14 days to issue the certificate.
• The certificate expiry date is the anniversary of the audit plus 42 days. That buffer is what protects continuous certification if a non-conformity takes time to close.
• An early audit, before the window opens, moves the anniversary and so every date after it.

My Model: Know Your Categories, Know Your Dates

I give sites two short lists to complete before they book anything.

List one: categories. For every product you make, write the category or categories from the appendix, and note the processes you actually carry out on site. Compare that with what is on your current certificate. If something has moved, tell your certification body early, because it can change audit time and auditor choice.

List two: dates. Write down your last audit date, your due date, your window and your certificate expiry. Then add the days you need to close non-conformities. If that final date lands close to your expiry, you have no room for a bad audit.

Where Sites Get Caught Out

The usual traps are leaving a secondary category off the list and finding the audit cannot go ahead because the auditor is not approved for it, assuming an early audit does not change later dates when it does, and taking the full 90 days on an initial audit without noticing the certificate then expires sooner than expected. You can test your next audit against 1 June 2027 with the free checker on my Issue 5 hub, and the audit protocol post covers the options in detail.

If you are not sure your categories are right, a short remote scoping session sorts it out before it becomes an audit planning problem. My transition plan shows where it fits in the months ahead.