Supplier Questionnaire

This assessment establishes and refreshes a supplier's declared control baseline. It is not where you decide to approve them, and it is not where you verify what they've declared.

The clauses below map what the questionnaire is actually discharging: proportionate, risk-based evaluation of an external provider, refreshed rather than assumed to still hold true.

A self-reported questionnaire sits differently depending on who is expected to have verified the underlying claims and under what regulatory pressure.

The scoring is mechanical, but four judgement calls decide whether the resulting record actually means what the score implies.

These are the gaps that surface when a questionnaire is reviewed against what has actually changed since it was last sent, rather than taken at face value.

A packaging-adjacent ingredient supplier was approved two years ago on a questionnaire showing GFSI-recognised certification and a risk-based environmental monitoring programme. The supplier remained on the approved list, and the original questionnaire sat in the file as the only evidence anyone had ever asked.

When a customer audit asked for current certification evidence, the buyer discovered the supplier's certification body relationship had lapsed eight months earlier after a change of scheme, and nobody had refreshed the questionnaire to catch it. The approval had been valid on the day it was granted and stale for most of the time it was relied on — the fix was making the annual refresh a system trigger rather than a manual reminder.

The questionnaire is the easy part to send. Noticing when a certificate has quietly lapsed since the last refresh is the work that actually slips.

KnowQuality

Schedules the annual refresh from the last Sent Date, and flags a supplier whose approval is resting on a questionnaire older than its own review cycle.

KnowComply

Tracks certification expiry dates declared on the questionnaire against the certifying body's own records where available, and surfaces a lapse before the next scheduled refresh would have caught it.

KnowSafe

Watches the food safety and foreign body detection answers for a downgrade between refreshes — a control that weakens quietly is a bigger signal than one that was always weak.

Ella

Coordinates the crew across the vendor register and the questionnaire cycle, rolling overdue refreshes and score changes into one view, and holds every write for your approval.

GFSI

The Global Food Safety Initiative, a benchmarking programme that recognises specific certification schemes (such as BRCGS, IFS, SQF) as meeting a common baseline. GFSI itself does not certify suppliers directly — it recognises the schemes that do.

HACCP

Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points — a systematic method for identifying and controlling food safety hazards at specific points in a process. A HACCP plan existing is different from the team responsible for it being currently trained.

Prerequisite programme

The foundational hygiene and operational controls (cleaning, pest control, maintenance) that a HACCP plan assumes are already in place. A HACCP plan without documented prerequisites is built on an unverified base.

Foreign body detection

Physical controls — metal detection, X-ray, magnets, sieves, optical sorting, visual checks — used to catch unintended physical contaminants before product leaves the supplier's site.

Food fraud programme

A documented assessment of vulnerability to intentional adulteration or substitution for economic gain, distinct from unintentional food safety hazards covered elsewhere in the questionnaire.