BRCGS Food Issue 10: what we actually know (and what's guesswork)

Every standard revision follows the same arc. First the rumours, then the consultation nobody hears about until it's nearly closed, then eighteen months of LinkedIn posts confidently describing changes that haven't been decided yet, then the standard lands and every technical manager in the country has six months to rewrite their systems while still doing the day job.

We're currently in the rumour-and-guesswork phase for Issue 10. This page keeps the two piles separate: what's confirmed, and what's noise.

Confirmed, with dates

• Public consultation ran 9 January – 15 February 2026. Five weeks — a short window, and practitioners on the forums said exactly that.
• The Technical Working Group was announced in April 2026. That group drafts the standard. Retailers, certification bodies, industry reps — the usual constitution.
• BRCGS has said nothing official about a publication date.

That's the complete list. Everything else you've read is inference.

The informed guesswork (labelled as such)

The Issue 9 cycle is the best predictor we have: published August 2022, audits against it from February 2023 — roughly six months from publication to first audits. Run the same clock forward from where the TWG process is now and you land on publication in the second half of 2027, audits from early-to-mid 2028. Practitioners on IFSQN are converging on the same maths. Treat it as a planning assumption, not a promise.

What might be in it? I'm not going to pretend to know — the TWG has barely started, and anyone selling you an "Issue 10 readiness" course in August 2026 is selling you a horoscope. The safe structural bets, based on where GFSI benchmarking and the wider regulatory weather are heading: continued tightening on food safety culture (the Issue 9 theme that audits have struggled to assess consistently), supply chain transparency pressure (the same forces driving EUDR don't stop at the factory gate), and — my one speculative flag — whether the food fraud and authenticity requirements in section 5.4 get sharpened, given what's happened in honey and vanilla since Issue 9 was drafted. Flagged, dated, and I'll be back to mark my own homework.

What Issue 9 taught us about revision years

Three lessons from the last cycle worth banking now:

The guide costs money. BRCGS sold the Issue 9 "Guide to Key Changes" as a paid PDF (£140). Expect the same. The gap between "standard published" and "affordable plain-English interpretation available" is real, and it's exactly the gap this site exists to fill.

Training prices spike into the transition. Two-day Issue 9 conversion courses ran £650+ per seat. Multiply by your team size and it's a budget line worth forecasting this year if your audit lands early in the Issue 10 window.

Early-window audits are the roughest. Auditors are learning the standard too. Sites audited in the first six months of Issue 9 reported the most inconsistent interpretations. If you have any influence over your audit timing relative to the transition date, use it.

What to do now (it's not much, deliberately)

1. Nothing dramatic. Anyone rewriting systems for Issue 10 in 2026 is burning effort on a draft that doesn't exist.
2. Put a placeholder in your 2027/28 budget — training seats, the changes guide, possible consultancy days, and internal time for the gap assessment.
3. Close out your known Issue 9 weaknesses. Whatever your last audit's minor NCs cluster around, that's your Issue 10 gap assessment starting point regardless of what changes.
4. Bookmark this page. When the TWG produces something real, it'll be here in plain English within days — free, not as a £140 PDF.

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Written by a practitioner who sits the audits, not a certification body selling the transition. One Step Back — one email when something actually changes.

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