Improve safety, integrity, legality and quality of your products and consistently meet customer expectations.

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Certification of your product management system demonstrates your commitment to consistency, continual improvement and customer satisfaction. These are tangible business benefits that play an important part in building resilience and sustainable business performance.

The BRCGS consumer product standards provide specific requirements for the production and supply of safe and legal consumer products of consistent quality, that will enhance your ability to consistently deliver products that meet customer, as well as statutory and regulatory, demands.

What is BRCGS consumer product standards, issue 4?

Applicable to all types of company producing non-food consumer products, the standards are based on a number of quality management principles and product risk management, including management commitment, process control, site standards and continual improvement.

Companies can select implementation and certification to the foundation or higher levels, offering flexibility and choice.

There are two standards within the BRCGS consumer products portfolio.

• Personal care and household products: covers formulated and fabricated products such as cosmetics, medical devices, food wrap, nappies and household cleaning products all of which are considered to have typically higher requirements for hygiene standards due to the nature of the usage of the product.
• General merchandise items: covers a wide range of mainly fabricated product such as electrical items, toys, furniture, textiles and where management of production processes to ensure product safety and quality is the primary concern.

BRCGS consumer product standards are not intended to replace requirements to demonstrate regulatory compliance. They do review and assess the ability of the organization to demonstrate up to date knowledge of and compliance with regulatory requirements in the country or regions of intended sale.

There is a consistent focus on the importance of management commitment, risk assessments to ensure the product's design is safe and legal before production, process risk assessment as a tool to ensure potential issues in the production of the products have been understood, prioritized and effectively managed.

The design and maintenance of the factory and production environment to ensure this is suitable to manufacture and protects products from contamination is also included.

Benefits of becoming certified

Checking that your system works is vital. Certification to BRCGS consumer product standards by an independent third-party verifies how your production management system is performing and demonstrates your work to apply effective management principles within the organization.  As a result:

• Better protect your brand and customers;
• Gain greater brand confidence when applying and getting certified to globally recognized schemes;
• Enable faster time to market as certification allows faster procurement from new suppliers;
• Reduce the audit burden when applying globally recognized industry standards.

Getting started

To be certified, you first need to implement an effective product safety and quality management system complying with the standard’s requirements.

DNV is an accredited third-party certification body and can help you throughout the journey starting from relevant training to self-assessments, gap analysis and certification services.

Learn more about how to get started on the road to certification.