BRCGS Product Safety and Quality Culture Plans: How to Build One That Is Not a Poster

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

Culture has been creeping up the BRCGS agenda for years, and Issue 5 of Consumer Products firms it up: a defined plan for developing the site’s product safety and quality culture, with the requirements phasing in over time, a documented action plan with timescales becoming auditable from April 2028 and the review of effectiveness from April 2029. Plenty of sites will respond with a poster campaign and a values statement. Auditors have seen a thousand posters. Here is how to build a plan with substance.

What Culture Actually Means Here

Strip the buzzword away and product safety culture is simply: what do people on this site actually do when nobody is checking? Do operators stop the line for a product concern, or push it through because the schedule is king? Do people report near-misses, or does bad news get buried? Does management fund the fix or defer it? A culture plan is a deliberate programme for moving those behaviours in the right direction, and being able to show it is working.

The Elements of a Real Plan

Communication with a pulse. Regular, two-way, specific. Line briefings about actual complaints and actual findings beat generic slogans every time.

Feedback channels people trust. The Issue 5 draft pairs the culture plan with a confidential reporting system for product safety, legality and quality concerns, and the two live or die together. A culture plan sitting alongside a reporting channel nobody dares use is fiction. Assess what comes in, act on it, and be seen to act on it.

Training that targets behaviours. Not just competence for tasks, but the harder material: why we stop the line, why we report, what happened at sites that did not.

Measurement. This is what separates a plan from a poster. Pick indicators you can trend: near-miss reporting rates, internal audit findings by area, complaint trends, culture survey scores, time-to-close on corrective actions. The action plan needs timescales, and the activities need measures, because from 2029 you will be reviewing effectiveness, not attendance.

Start Now, Not in 2028

The phased dates are not an invitation to wait. Culture indicators move slowly, and a plan started in 2026 has evidence of movement by the time the requirements bite, while a plan started in 2028 is a plan on paper. Senior management should also expect to discuss the plan’s implementation directly with the auditor, so this cannot live with the quality manager alone. The full context sits in my Issue 5 draft breakdown, and building measurable culture plans is part of my transition project work with sites. Buttons below.