Why We're SALSA Accredited and What That Means for You

We have held SALSA accreditation since 2019, and I am writing this post because most of our customers have never heard of it — which is fair enough. SALSA stands for Safe and Local Supplier Approval, and it is a food safety certification designed specifically for smaller UK food and drink producers. It is not a marketing badge. It is an independently assessed, annually audited confirmation that the way we make food here in Bottesford meets a defined set of safety standards. This is what it covers, what the process actually involves, and why I think it matters to you as a customer.

What SALSA accreditation is

SALSA — Safe and Local Supplier Approval — was created to give smaller UK food and drink producers a credible route to demonstrating food safety standards. Larger suppliers typically use BRCGS or STS certification, but those schemes are designed for industrial-scale operations. SALSA fills the gap: it applies the same underlying food safety principles to businesses our size, with annual on-site audits carried out by qualified food safety professionals.

To hold SALSA accreditation, a business must pass an initial audit and then renew that accreditation every year. There is no grandfathering in — every year, an independent auditor visits the site, assesses the operation against the scheme's standards, and signs off (or does not). Our current certificate, issued under the SALSA Food & Drink Production standard, runs to March 2027. You can check our listing in the SALSA public directory yourself.

What the annual audit actually covers

The SALSA audit is broader than people expect. It is not a one-question tick-box about whether the premises are clean. It covers several interlocking areas of food safety management, and each one has to be in good order before the certificate is issued.

The core of any SALSA audit is HACCP — Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. This is the systematic approach to identifying where things can go wrong in food production and putting controls in place to prevent them. For us, that means working through every step of what we do: how raw materials are received and checked, how they are stored, how products are made and filled, how contamination risks are managed, and how finished products are labelled and dispatched. HACCP is not a document you write once; it has to be actively maintained and reviewed.

Allergen management is audited separately and rigorously. The rules around the fourteen major allergens are specific and legally required in the UK, and the audit checks that our documentation, our labelling, and our physical processes all align. This matters to customers who are buying around an allergy or intolerance — they need to be able to trust what is printed on the pack.

Traceability is another area the auditors look at in detail. Every ingredient we use must be traceable back to its supplier, and every batch of finished product must be traceable forward to where it went. If there were ever a quality or safety issue with an ingredient, we would need to be able to identify quickly which batches of product were affected and where they had been sent. This is the infrastructure that makes a product recall work — and the fact that it has to be demonstrable to an auditor every year keeps it from becoming theoretical paperwork.

The audit also covers food microbiology — which is to say, the management of microbial risk in the production environment — and pest management. Neither of these is glamorous, but both matter. A supplement that tests well on paper but has been made in a poorly managed environment is not a product worth selling.

Why this matters, even if you have never heard of it

There are a lot of food supplement brands in the UK, and the quality of what goes on behind the scenes varies considerably. The supplement market is less tightly regulated at the manufacturing level than pharmaceuticals, which means the difference between producers who take food safety seriously and those who do not is not always visible on the label. SALSA accreditation is one of the ways a customer can check that a smaller producer has been independently assessed rather than just self-certified.

I applied for SALSA accreditation in 2019 because I wanted an external check on what we were doing here. We had always been careful — we have to be, because the products we make are ones we use ourselves and sell to people who have trusted us for years. But careful is not the same as independently verified, and I thought it was worth the investment to have that verification in place. We have renewed it every year since.

For customers who want to understand more about what goes into the supplements they take, our posts on additives to avoid in supplements and what clean label supplements actually means cover the product side in more detail.

How SALSA sits alongside our Soil Association certification

We are also Soil Association certified organic, under licence DA25511. The two certifications do different things and they are not alternatives to each other.

Soil Association certification is about what goes into our products — the sourcing, the farming standards, the absence of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, and the audit trail back through the supply chain to confirm that organic standards have been maintained at every step. We have written a separate post on why we chose Soil Association certification and what sets it apart from other UK organic certifiers, which goes into the detail of that.

SALSA accreditation is about how we make our products — the physical production environment, the safety systems, the documentation, and the management of risk in the process of turning raw materials into finished goods. It is about what happens in our unit in Bottesford, not what happens on the farms we source from.

Together, they address both ends of the question a careful customer might reasonably ask: what is in this, and how was it made? We think both questions deserve a proper answer.

How to check for yourself

SALSA maintains a public directory of all currently accredited businesses. You do not need to take our word for any of this — our listing is publicly searchable at salsafood.co.uk and shows the standard we hold, our production site address, and the expiry date of our current certificate. If you want to verify any other supplier's SALSA status, the same directory works for them.

Similarly, Soil Association certification can be verified through the Soil Association's own licence lookup, using our licence number DA25511.

If you have any questions about our production setup or our certifications that are not answered here, you are welcome to drop us a line directly — Ian and Aon are at the other end of that email.

Frequently asked questions

What does SALSA stand for?

SALSA stands for Safe and Local Supplier Approval. It is a UK food safety certification scheme designed for smaller food and drink producers, with annual on-site audits carried out by independent, qualified auditors. It is run by a not-for-profit company and is recognised by the Food Standards Agency.

How is SALSA different from BRCGS?

BRCGS (Brand Reputation Compliance Global Standards) is a widely used food safety standard in the UK, but it is designed for larger-scale manufacturing operations. SALSA applies the same underlying food safety principles — HACCP, allergen management, traceability, microbiology — to smaller producers in a way that is appropriate for businesses of our size. Both require independent auditing; SALSA is not a lighter version, it is a different scale of the same rigour.

How often is SALSA accreditation renewed?

Annually. Every year, an independent auditor visits our production site in Bottesford, assesses the operation against the SALSA Food & Drink Production standard, and either issues or withholds the certificate. We have held our accreditation continuously since 2019.

Does SALSA accreditation mean your supplements are pharmaceutical grade?

No, and we would not claim that. Food supplements in the UK are regulated as foods, not medicines, and SALSA is a food safety standard, not a pharmaceutical standard. What it does confirm is that our production environment, safety systems, allergen controls, and traceability processes have been independently audited and found to meet the scheme's requirements.

Where can I verify your SALSA accreditation?

Our listing is in the SALSA public directory. It shows our current certificate, the standard we hold, and our production site address. No login or registration is needed to check it.

What is the Soil Association certification you also hold?

Soil Association certification is our organic certification, held under licence DA25511. It covers the sourcing and supply chain of our ingredients — confirming that the farming and production methods used meet Soil Association organic standards. It is separate from SALSA, which covers our own manufacturing process rather than our supply chain. You can read more in our post on what organic certification actually means for supplements.