Unannounced audit

An unannounced audit is an audit of a food plant carried out without the site being told the date in advance, conducted by a certification body auditor or by a customer's own technical team, against the same standard and scope as an announced visit.

The logic is straightforward. An announced date gives a site time to prepare, and preparation is not the same thing as steady practice. By removing the date, the audit samples a normal day: the line running as it normally runs, the records as they stand, the supplier folder as it was left after the last upload.

Unannounced audits are usually not a separate standard but a mode of delivery within an existing one. The major certification schemes publish their own protocols for how unannounced visits are scheduled, what notice if any is given on the day, and how findings are graded. Those rules change between scheme versions, so the authoritative answer for your site is your scheme's current protocol and your contract with your certification body, not a vendor page. Customer-led unannounced visits sit outside that entirely and follow whatever your supply agreement says.

The moment is familiar to anyone who has worked in QA. An auditor is in reception on a Tuesday morning. Within the first hour they want the approved supplier list, and then they start pulling threads from it: the current allergen declaration for one named ingredient, the certificate of analysis for the batch running on line two, the audit certificate for the co-packer you added in March.

Every one of those documents is either current on file or it is not. There is no window in which to email the supplier, wait two days, chase again, and slot the PDF in before the opening meeting. An expired allergen declaration found on file is a finding raised against your supplier approval and document control, and how it is graded depends on the scheme, the scope and the auditor's judgement.

The decision this puts in front of you

If audits could always be announced, a spreadsheet and a hard fortnight of chasing would hold. Once the date can be any date, the question becomes whether your supplier certificate records are accurate on a random Tuesday. That is a different job: continuous expiry tracking and routine chasing, rather than a pre-audit scramble. Our guide to BRCGS supplier approval and performance monitoring walks through which documents the evidence usually rests on, and the walkthrough on preparing the supplier document pack before recertification covers the announced-audit version of the same work.

• Announced audit. The same audit with a scheduled, agreed date. Most sites run a mix of announced and unannounced visits across a certification cycle, depending on scheme and customer requirements.
• Audit window. The period in which an unannounced visit may fall. Schemes typically define it relative to your previous audit date or certificate expiry, so check the protocol that applies to your scope.
• Non-conformance (NC). A recorded failure against a clause of the standard, commonly graded as minor, major or critical. An out-of-date certificate on file is usually recorded here rather than treated as an informal note.
• Corrective action and CAPA. What you submit to close out a finding: the fix, the root cause, and the change that stops it recurring. For a lapsed certificate, "we chased the supplier" is the fix; the preventive part is the tracking that flags the next one early.
• Approved supplier list. The controlled register of who you buy from and what documentation each supplier must hold. It is normally the first document an auditor asks for, and the entry point into your certificate records.
• Document control. The system that keeps records current, versioned and retrievable. Unannounced audits test it harder than announced ones, because retrieval happens on demand.
• Audit-ready evidence pack. The set of records you can hand over on request. See the page on exporting the certificate status view as a PDF for how that looks for supplier certificates specifically.
• CoA and allergen declaration. Two of the supplier documents most often sampled, both dated, both capable of lapsing quietly between audits.