SALSA Issue 7: What Has Changed and What Auditors Will Check From 1 September

If your SALSA audit falls any time after 1 September 2026, it will be conducted against Issue 7 of the Food and Drink Production Standard. Not your next renewal. Not when your certificate expires. Every audit, from that date, against the new issue.

There is no transition period. SALSA has been explicit about this: from 1 September, all audits are conducted against the new issues regardless of when your audit falls. If your audit is booked for September or October, the standard you prepared for last year is not the standard you will be assessed against next month.

Here is what you need to know, and what to do about it.

The headlines first

Issue 7 was published on 1 June 2026 alongside new issues of all four SALSA Standards: Food and Drink Production moved to Issue 7, SALSA plus Beer to Issue 5, SALSA plus Cheese to Issue 7, and Brokers, Storage and Distribution to Issue 2.

Three things worth knowing straight away:

The standard itself is free to download. You do not need to be a member to read the full Issue 7 document or the official Summary of Changes. Both are on the SALSA website. If you have not downloaded your copies yet, do that today. It is the single most useful thing you can do this week.

Fees are not changing. SALSA has confirmed there is no change to membership or audit fees as part of this update.

The clock has already run. Producers had June, July and August to prepare. If you are reading this in late August with an autumn audit booked, you are not behind everyone else, but you are behind the standard. The good news is that most of what Issue 7 asks for is evidence of things you should already be doing. The gap, for most small producers, is the paperwork that proves it.

Why the standard changed

SALSA reviews its standards periodically to keep them aligned with current legislation, evolving best practice, and what buyers and enforcement bodies expect from approved suppliers. That last part matters more than it sounds. SALSA approval exists so that small producers can supply national and regional buyers who would otherwise demand BRCGS-level certification. When buyer expectations move, the standard moves with them, because that is what keeps a SALSA certificate worth having.

Issue 7 is the sixth revision since the standard launched in 2007. The previous issue, Issue 6, dates from 2022. Four years of legislative change, allergen incidents, recall lessons and buyer feedback are baked into this revision.

What is actually new

Seven requirements in Issue 7 have no equivalent in Issue 6 at all. Each needs a written procedure, and most need records. If any of these describe your business, they belong at the top of your list:

• New product development (clause 3.9.1): a documented process for how new products, recipes, packaging or process changes are developed, trialled and approved. If you tweak recipes often, this one is aimed at you.
• Breakable packaging (1.5.8): specific controls for packing into glass jars and bottles. Preserves makers, sauce makers, brewers and distillers, this is yours.
• Taste testing hygiene (1.5.9): documented hygienic controls for tasting and organoleptic assessment of your own product. Almost every producer does this daily; almost none has it written down.
• Reusable containers (1.3.6): controls for returnable and reusable food contact containers, from kegs to growlers.
• Visitor tours and tastings (4.3.3): a procedure for managing visitors through production, including tastings.
• A digital security plan (4.2.4): a written plan covering digital failure and cyber attack, reviewed annually. Where are your records backed up, who holds the passwords, what happens if the laptop dies.
• Recorded GMP inspection walks (4.4.8): a programme of regular, recorded good manufacturing practice checks across the whole site, ancillary areas included.

What auditors will actually check

Beyond the brand-new clauses, the pattern across the revision is consistent, and it tells you where audit attention will land.

1. Living documentation, not shelf documentation.

The clearest thread through Issue 7 is the expectation that your food safety management system is something you use, not something you produced once for an audit. Review obligations now recur throughout: supplier lists, specifications, food fraud assessments, shelf life, security plans and pest control analysis all carry annual review requirements, with dated records expected.

For producers whose HACCP plan was written two years ago by a consultant and has not been opened since, this is the change that bites. An auditor working to Issue 7 is not just asking whether you have a plan. They are asking when you last reviewed it, what triggered that review, and where the record of it is.

2. Annual obligations you can evidence.

Several requirements carry an explicit annual cadence, and some have doubled. Traceability is the clearest example: Issue 7 splits it into two separate annual exercises, a forwards trace from raw material to customer and a backwards trace from finished product to supplier (clauses 3.3.3 and 3.3.4). A single mass balance exercise is now half the requirement. Shelf life must now be reviewed and validated annually with records (3.8.1). The incident procedure must be challenge tested annually, including a communication test (3.4.2).

Practical test: pick any recurring obligation in your system, then try to put your hand on the record proving the most recent occurrence in under two minutes. If you cannot, the auditor probably cannot either.

3. Proof that things work, not just that they exist.

Issue 7 repeatedly swaps "have a document" for "show me it works." Cleaning procedures must now be validated as effective for the products you make (1.3.2), not just scheduled. Allergen suitability claims must be validated by accredited laboratory testing. Verification and records language appears throughout the standard.

4. Allergen control as an active discipline.

Allergen management carries two of the biggest changes in the revision. Issue 7 requires a documented risk assessment of allergens at each process step (1.4.2), not just a raw materials matrix, with your controls visibly flowing from its outcome. And allergen labelling must now be verified as correct everywhere it appears, explicitly including e-commerce listings, marketing copy and your website (1.4.4). If your online shop says gluten free and your specification says may contain, that is now an audit finding.

5. Records that hold up on their own.

Underlying all of the above is a simple standard of proof: could a stranger reconstruct what your business did, and when, from the records alone? The phrase "records shall be kept" is the single most repeated addition across the whole revision. Daily checks with gaps, temperature logs filled in retrospectively in one pen, training records that stop eighteen months ago: auditors read these fluently, and Issue 7 gives them a sharper mandate to act on what they see.

What to do between now and your audit

If your audit is in the next eight to twelve weeks, this is the order of work:

Week one: read the standard and the Summary of Changes. Both are free downloads from the SALSA website. Members should also work through the digital self-assessment checklist in the member portal, which walks the new issue section by section.

Week two: gap-check your documentation against the new issue. Every clause that asks for a review, a frequency or a record: find yours, check its date, and list what is missing or stale. Start with the seven brand-new requirements above.

Weeks three to five: close the gaps that need time. Both traceability tests, the incident challenge test, cleaning validation, any training that has lapsed, supplier records that need chasing. These are the items you cannot fabricate the week before an audit, because the dates matter.

Weeks six to eight: bring the daily records up to standard. Whatever your monitoring regime is, make sure the recent record is complete, contemporaneous and signed. An auditor will weight the last three months of records far more heavily than the last three years.

Throughout: use the free SALSA resources. The webinar recordings from June are on SALSA's YouTube channel and open to everyone, members or not. If you want one-to-one help, SALSA mentors exist for exactly this.

The honest close

Issue 7 does not ask small producers to become factories. It asks them to run the systems they claim to run, and to keep the evidence. For a well-run kitchen, the gap between Issue 6 compliance and Issue 7 compliance is mostly administrative: reviews with dates on them, records that are current, exercises you have actually rehearsed.

The producers who struggle in September will not be the ones with weak food safety. They will be the ones with strong food safety and weak paperwork, because the paperwork is what an audit can see.

That is also, for what it is worth, the problem FoodSafe was built for: keeping the daily records, the reviews and the evidence current as a by-product of running your kitchen, rather than as a scramble the month before an audit. If the eight-week plan above looks like a lot of manual admin, there are better ways to carry it.

Either way: download Issue 7 this week, read it against your own system, and let the gap list drive your next eight weeks. From 1 September, it is the only standard your auditor will be carrying.