It comes after three years of work by the GFSI Auditor Competence Working Group, tasked by the GFSI Board to define generic food safety auditor competencies underpinning GFSI benchmarked schemes, and the mechanisms they can be assessed and verified.

The group involved Cargill, ConAgra, General Mills, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, Silliker and The Coca-Cola Company.

The competency framework is a list of agreed generic knowledge and skill components that can be applied across all post farm‐gate GFSI benchmarked schemes.

It will be re‐released in 2014 to include the pre farm‐gate sector and competencies will be added as sector‐specific GFSI Technical Working groups draft the requirements for their particular industry.

Yves Rey, chair of the GFSI Board and corporate quality general manager at Danone, said: “Year upon year at our annual GFSI Stakeholder meeting, we asked for the three key areas that GFSI should focus on during the coming year. And every year the answer was the same: auditor competence.

“There has long been a need for clearer competence definition, application, and assessment and the publication of this competency framework is the first step to achieving this mandate.”

The competency framework is published on the GFSI website so that stakeholders can access them freely.