What Happens After You Fail a SALSA Audit? (And How to Fix It)

First, breathe. You probably haven't "failed."

If your SALSA audit threw up non-conformances, it's natural to feel like you've failed. But the word "fail" is misleading. Almost every audit, including those of well-run businesses, results in some non-conformances. They're a normal part of the process, not a verdict on you as a producer. What matters is how you respond to them.

Here's what non-conformances actually mean and exactly how to deal with them.

What a non-conformance is

A non-conformance is simply a point where your operation didn't meet a requirement of the SALSA standard at the time of the audit. It might be a missing record, an expired supplier certificate, a procedure that wasn't being followed, or a gap in your HACCP plan.

Non-conformances are categorised by seriousness. More serious ones relate to issues with a direct food safety impact and need prompt correction. Less serious ones are still real but lower-risk. The categorisation tells you how urgently and how thoroughly you need to respond, but in practice the approach to fixing them is the same: understand the root cause, correct it, and provide evidence.

The correction process

When you receive non-conformances, you're given a window to address them and submit evidence of correction before certification is confirmed. For each one, you generally need to provide three things:

1. Correction - what you did immediately to fix the specific problem. If a certificate had expired, you obtained the current one.
2. Root cause - why it happened in the first place. The certificate expired because nobody was tracking expiry dates.
3. Corrective action - what you've changed so it can't recur. You've put a system in place to flag certificates before they lapse.

That middle step is the one producers skip, and it's the one that matters most. Fixing the immediate problem without addressing why it happened means it simply comes back next year. Auditors want to see you've dealt with the cause, not just the symptom.

What to do, step by step

When the findings land, work through them calmly:

1. Read each non-conformance carefully and make sure you understand exactly what's being asked. If anything is unclear, ask the auditor or SALSA for clarification rather than guessing.
2. Prioritise by seriousness and deadline. Tackle the higher-category findings first.
3. Fix the immediate issue and gather evidence: a photo, an updated document, a new record.
4. Identify the root cause honestly. Don't write "staff error" if the real cause is that there was no system to prevent it.
5. Put a lasting corrective action in place and document it.
6. Submit your evidence within the window, clearly mapped to each finding.

Respond promptly. Leaving it to the last day of the window adds risk if your evidence needs adjusting.

The most common findings, and how to prevent them

Most non-conformances cluster around a handful of predictable areas:

• Expired supplier certificates. Prevent with a system that tracks expiry and flags certificates before they lapse.
• Gaps in records. Prevent with a routine that makes daily checks habitual, and ideally reminders so a missed check is caught the same day.
• HACCP plan not matching reality. Prevent by updating the plan whenever products or processes change, rather than once a year.
• Untested recall procedure. Prevent by running and documenting a mock recall annually.
• Weak corrective action records. Prevent by recording the actual value, the breach, and what you did, every time.

Several of these come down to the same thing: information that quietly goes out of date or slips through the cracks. FoodSafe addresses a good number of them directly, tracking supplier certificate expiry, timestamping records as they're entered, and keeping your HACCP plan easy to update, so the issues that most often appear as findings are managed before they become findings.

Turning findings into improvement

There's a more useful way to see non-conformances: as a free, expert review of your weak spots. A qualified auditor has just told you precisely where your system is vulnerable. Producers who treat that as feedback rather than failure tend to have cleaner audits each year, because they're systematically closing the gaps that were pointed out.

Keep a record of every non-conformance you've ever received and what you did about it. Before each annual audit, review that list and confirm none have crept back. Over a couple of cycles, this turns a stressful event into a steadily improving system.

You've got this

A SALSA audit with non-conformances isn't a failure; it's the normal start of a correction process that's designed to be worked through. Understand each finding, fix the root cause rather than just the symptom, evidence your corrections within the window, and build the habits that stop them recurring. Handle it that way and you don't just get certified; you come out with a genuinely stronger operation.

If you're preparing for your next audit and want to go in with as few gaps as possible, our 30-day SALSA preparation plan lays out exactly what to do and when.

Food safety compliance, handled.