Introduction: Why a Supplier Approval Program Matters
In today’s complex supply chains, each supplier can impact your food safety, regulatory compliance, and business continuity. A best-in-class Supplier Approval Program is also a strategic advantage, helping you onboard the right partners faster and proactively mitigate risks.
This guide presents four best practices, drawn from real-world experience, to help food safety and QA leaders from food manufacturers like you build a scalable supplier approval process. You’ll learn how to:
Establish a role-based SOP for supplier approval
Define clear approval criteria
Collect supplier data and assess their risk
Govern your Approved Supplier List
Implement these practices to drive safer, faster, and more cost-effective supplier onboarding.
Best Practice 1: Establish an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure)
A well-defined SOP ensures every team member understands their responsibilities and follows a consistent, standardized process. It helps guarantee that all materials and services you receive come from properly approved suppliers. Key components often include:
Responsibilities: Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of all involved teams, such as purchasing, quality, regulatory, and warehouse, to ensure alignment and accountability throughout the supplier approval process.
Approval Process: Outline each step, from supplier identification through supplier continuous performance monitoring.
Required Documentation: Specify the mandatory documents required from suppliers based on their risk level. Additionally, outline shipment-specific requirements, such as requiring a Certificate of Analysis (CoA) for each lot of ingredients.
Verification Activities: Detail risk-based checks (sampling, safety-record reviews, on-site audits).
Shipment Acceptance: Define clear criteria for accepting or rejecting shipments based on the Certificate of Analysis (CoA), Certificate of Conformance (CoC), and results of a visual inspection.
Performance Monitoring: Establish metrics and a schedule for ongoing supplier evaluation.
Documentation Management: Define how to handle and store supplier information in the ERP or QMS.
Emergencies: Outline procedures for managing emergency suppliers, including the documentation required (e.g., spec sheets, CoAs, third-party audit certificates).
Brokers & Distributors: Specify how to manage brokers and distributors, including requirements for disclosing the original suppliers, particularly for imported products.
Disqualification Criteria: Define clear grounds for removal (e.g., missing documents, out-of-spec results, non-conformances).
Best Practice 2: Define Clear Criteria
Defining clear criteria for suppliers is essential not only during the initial approval process but also for ongoing management, ensuring consistent performance and compliance
It’s important to gather requirements from different teams to ensure the approval process aligns with cross-functional needs:
R&D (or the customer, in a co-manufacturing setup): Define precise product specifications early on. Strong supplier relationships rely on clear requirements, and early collaboration helps prevent delays and enhances overall performance.
Quality & Safety: Responsible for ensuring suppliers are fully compliant, including defining the required documentation such as HACCP plans, allergen control programs, and microbial limits that align with GFSI and FSMA standards.
Procurement: Primarily focuses on pricing and key operational requirements, ensuring that the suppliers can meet cost expectations while reliably delivering materials to support uninterrupted production.
The team needs to translate requirements into clear, measurable metrics that can be used to assess supplier performance, both during the onboarding process and throughout ongoing evaluations. Some examples include:
Technical Attributes: For example, % moisture and pH range can be verified through lab reports and Certificates of Analysis (CoAs).
Certification Status: For example, GFSI certifications and the most recent audit date can be verified by reviewing the completed questionnaire and the supporting documents submitted by the supplier
Service KPIs: For example, on-time delivery rate and fill rate can be tracked and analyzed using the purchase order history from the ERP system
Risk Indicators: For example, recall history can be monitored through the FDA and other external databases.
Best Practice 3: Supplier Questionnaires & Risk Assessments
Manufacturers should have a Supplier Approval Questionnaire in place to collect essential information from their suppliers. This helps assess risk, ensure compliance, and support safe sourcing decisions. Common questions should include:
Basic company info (contacts, items supplied)
Regulatory status (FDA/USDA registration, past recalls or audit findings)
Certifications (GFSI certifications like SQF, BRC, or FSSC 22000)
Food safety programs (HACCP, GMP, sanitation, allergen control, recall plan)
Manufacturing practices (product testing, non-conformance handling, change control)
Traceability & documentation (CoAs, CoCs, specification sheets, audit reports)
Allergen disclosures (ingredient presence in products, facilities, or lines)
Food manufacturers should categorize suppliers into a few risk levels to effectively manage food safety and compliance. A common approach involves three categories:
Low-risk materials are those with minimal likelihood of introducing hazards, often because of the inherent nature of the product.
Medium-risk materials are those that present a moderate risk of contamination or hazard introduction.
High-risk materials are those that pose the greatest potential for contamination or safety issues, often associated with previous recalls, regulatory actions, or official warning letters.
Based on the supplier’s risk level, the required documentation varies. For example, low-risk suppliers may only need a short form and GFSI certification, while higher-risk tiers require more detailed questionnaires and even an onsite audit.
Manufacturers should also conduct supplier verification activities to ensure compliance, including product sampling and testing.
Best Practice 4: Govern Your Approved Supplier List
Manufacturers need to continuously monitor their suppliers to ensure they are consistently meeting quality, safety, and compliance standards. Ongoing oversight helps identify issues early, maintain reliable performance, and reduce the risk of supply chain disruptions.
To monitor supplier performance effectively, manufacturers should track key data points such as:
Supplier Compliance: Supplier Corrective Action Reports (SCARs), Non-Conforming Material Reports (NCMRs), deviation requests, CoA deviations, % of rejections, etc.
Document Compliance: Time taken to renew critical documents, number of expired or missing documents, etc.
Regulatory Compliance: regulatory actions (e.g., recalls, FDA warning letters), etc.
Operational Performance: On-time delivery rate, production-hold incidents, purchase order response time, etc.
Manufacturers should adopt a tiered approach to supplier management, with clear criteria for promoting suppliers to “Preferred,” placing them on “Probationary” status, or removing them from the approved list.
Some manufacturers use weighted scoring or automated systems to generate a composite risk score for each supplier, which is continuously updated to trigger audits or corrective actions when risk thresholds are exceeded.
Leverage AI‑Powered Tools like Bruce AI
To manage the complexity of supplier information, companies are increasingly adopting centralized technology platforms. These systems help digitize and organize documents related to suppliers and ingredients, storing key data such as supplier approvals, associated hazards, and performance metrics.
Among the many available solutions, the AI compliance platform, BruceAI, can significantly reduce manual effort and uncover insights that are difficult for humans to detect alone. Designed specifically for small to mid-sized food manufacturers, BruceAI helps teams do more with less by automating key parts of the supplier compliance process:
Intelligent Ingestion: Automatically extracts and tags critical data from supplier documents such as CoAs, audit reports, and certifications.
Automated Validation: Verifies required fields, tracks expiration dates, and flags missing or inconsistent documents.
Workflow Automation: Automatically triggers tasks and approvals based on supplier compliance status, no manual follow-up needed.
Supplier Collaboration: Offers an easy-to-use web portal where suppliers can quickly upload all required information and documentation.
Predictive Risk Scoring: Uses analytics to forecast supplier compliance risks and recommend proactive actions.
