[3] With legal obligations for their supply chains, and compliance connected to liability, European retailers decided to use technical standards to comply with public law requirements.
[4] Since then, experts from all over the world have been collaborating in numerous technical working groups to tackle current food safety issues defined by GFSI stakeholders.
Key activities within GFSI include the definition and control of minimum requirements for food safety certification programs and a robust benchmarking process.
In 2020, GFSI launched a program named The Race to the Top (RTTT), with the objective to address specific challenges in relation to lack of trust and confidence in GFSI-recognized certification.
[10] CEOs of global companies came together at the Consumer Goods Forum, knowing that under new pending EU food law, "unsatisfactory inspection results should lead to appropriate action".
GFSI was created to achieve this through the harmonization of food safety standards that would help mitigate liability exposure for retailers and reduce audit duplication throughout the supply chain.
GFSI therefore chose to implement benchmarking, developing a model that determines equivalency between existing food safety schemes, whilst leaving flexibility and choice in the marketplace.
This created strong competition among certification programme owners (CPO) who employ large marketing teams with annual growth targets.
GFSI benchmarking implies equivalency, though the financial opportunities with certification programme fees[12] resulted in a perverse incentive, with CPOs working to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
GFSI represents its Consumer Goods Forum members, and their steering committee governance[15] have controlling interest to decide benchmarking requirements.
[23] Under the umbrella of GFSI, eight major retailers (Carrefour, Tesco, ICA, Metro, Migros, Ahold, Wal-Mart, and Delhaize) operate as a private sector-led Multi-Stakeholder Initiative (MSI), also referred to as mult-istakeholder governance.
[24] The motivation for retailer- and brand-owner influence over benchmarking requirements for CPOs is focused on their legal liability, mostly related to food safety failures within supply chains.
[27] Retailers were cautious to avoid potential scandals, which resulted in taking the lead on technical committees and with governance over standard-setting organizations such as IFS and BRCGS.
A proposal was made to GFSI to adopt ISO 22000 as a single international standard for the reasons of impartiality, independence, consensus, and no scheme-owner fees.