IFS Food Standard

Standards

International Featured Standards for food safety — required by German and French retail buyers.

Sources

1. IFS — IFS Food Standard ifs-certification.com accessed 23 September 2026

IFS describes its food standard as one that “reviews the products and production processes to evaluate a food producer’s ability to produce safe, authentic, and quality products according to legal requirements and customer specifications”. The inclusion of authenticity alongside safety is deliberate and is what distinguishes this family of standards from pure food-safety schemes — it “supports businesses in meeting the growing transparency and traceability demands in the market and contributes to improving product integrity”. On how certification actually works: “qualified IFS Auditors working for independent accredited certification bodies carry out the audits”, so IFS itself does not audit. IFS characterises its approach as risk-based and non-prescriptive, with a scoring system rather than a pass-fail test — which means two certified suppliers are not necessarily equivalent, and the score is the thing to ask for.

What this source settles. Where a statute or a directive is quoted, that instrument governs within its own jurisdiction and its later amendments prevail over any summary. Where a body describes itself, the page is authoritative for what the body is and does, and not for how well it does it. Where a case study is cited, it records one dispute at one time and is evidence of the problem rather than of the current legal position.

Related terms

• BRC Global Standards
• FSSC 22000
• Halal Certification
• IATF 16949
• ISO 13485
• ISO 22000

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).