What Is a BRCGS ATP? How Auditor and Site Training Rollouts Work

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

With Issue 5 of the Consumer Products standard on the horizon, the question of training is about to matter to a lot of people at once, so it is worth explaining how the BRCGS training ecosystem actually works, and how the rollout of a new issue runs.

What an ATP Is

An ATP is a BRCGS Approved Training Partner: an organisation or individual approved by BRCGS to deliver the official courses for its standards, to consistent content and quality requirements, using approved trainers. Official ATP courses are how certification body auditors qualify to audit a standard, and how sites, consultants and retailers get trained on requirements and protocol by someone accredited to teach them. There is plenty of unofficial training in the market, some of it decent, but only official courses delivered through the ATP route carry BRCGS recognition, which matters a great deal if you are an auditor who needs to be qualified, and a reasonable amount if you are a site that wants training you can cite with confidence.

How a New Issue Rolls Out: Auditors First, Then Sites

Every BRCGS standard revision follows the same sequence. When the new issue publishes, certification body auditors must complete their conversion training on the new requirements and protocol before they are permitted to audit against it. Only once the auditor pool is converting does site-facing training ramp up, so that sites are trained ahead of their first audits against the new issue. For Consumer Products Issue 5, publishing in October 2026 with audits from April 2027, that puts auditor training demand into late 2026 and early 2027, a compressed window, and site training running from then onwards. Certification bodies that leave booking late will find themselves competing for a finite number of delivery slots with every other CB that also left it late.