What EU buyers actually audit when they visit a farm
Four years of buyer audits, and the same three things get checked every time. None of them is the certificate on the wall.
Pham Thu Ha
Head of Quality Assurance
· 7 min read
We host between six and ten buyer audits a year. The certificate is checked in the first ten minutes and then never mentioned again. What takes the rest of the day is whether the records behind it hold up.
Can you find a specific bag?
The test that separates suppliers is simple: the auditor picks a bag in the warehouse and asks which plot it came from. Not which farm — which plot, and which harvest pass.
If the answer requires a phone call, the audit is effectively over. Lot separation has to survive processing, and that is a physical discipline, not a software feature.
“The auditor picks a bag and asks which plot it came from. If that needs a phone call, the audit is over.”
Do the lab results belong to the lot?
A shipment-average moisture figure tells a buyer very little. Results have to attach to the lot, and out-of-tolerance lots have to be rejected rather than blended into the average.
Blending is the single most common finding we see when we audit other suppliers on behalf of buyers.
Were you prepared, or is this normal?
Experienced auditors can tell the difference between a facility that operates this way and one that tidied up last week. They ask for records from eight months ago, on a day nobody was expecting them.
Pham Thu Ha
Head of Quality Assurance
Writes about the work as it actually goes, including the parts that reflect badly on us.
