Sorry for adding to such an old post but lets say you are starting from scratch. If the customer requires sqf and sqf requires 90 days of records, how do you get started? If you cant sell the product made in the first 30-90 days and the shelf life (or customer need) is shorter than that, what do you then? I think in my situation (food contact packaging) we can simulate our future product on our current non contact product line but Im not even sure that will work either
Any suggestions or help on this?
Hmmmm.... Let me make sure I am understanding your question correctly.
You are saying that you have a customer that is requiring for you to be SQF certified before you can sell to them, however you aren't SQF certified as of yet, and you don't have ample documentation to be certified, correct?
If this is the case, have you had any third-party audits within the past year that you can supplement to the customer until you have your SQF audit? We ran into this issue prior to us becoming SQF certified, however all of our customers allowed us to provide them with our annual third-party audit until the completion of our SQF audit.
In the mean time, you have to compile as much documentation as possible so that you may have your SQF audit. When we went through with our initial audit, we only had about 2-3 months of documentation, however it was sufficient. More so I would focus more on the details that you have on the forms rather than having enough forms. Our auditor was impressed by the amount of information that we compressed into one form. Other facilities would require 4 or 5 forms to get the information that we would have on one form. Try to be as concise as possible, yet have all of the necessary standards met.