GLOBALG.A.P. Certification

GLOBALG.A.P. certification is third-party proof that a farm or aquaculture operation meets the GLOBALG.A.P. standard for good agricultural practices, food safety, environmental management, worker welfare, and animal welfare, verified by an accredited certification body auditing the site against the Integrated Farm Assurance (IFA) standard.

For a produce grower, a fish farm, or a packing operation, GLOBALG.A.P. is usually the certificate a European retailer asks for before your product goes on a shelf. It sits at the farm end of the supply chain, where a food manufacturer’s SQF or BRCGS certificate does not reach. This guide covers what the standard certifies, how IFA is structured, what the GRASP labor add-on is, how the audit works, and how the whole thing connects to the GFSI certification most large buyers are really chasing.

What is GLOBALG.A.P. certification?

GLOBALG.A.P. certification confirms that a producer follows a defined set of good agricultural practices at the farm level. The name is short for “Global Good Agricultural Practices,” and the standard is owned and published by FoodPLUS GmbH, a non-profit based in Cologne, Germany. It began in 1997 as EUREPGAP, a European retailer initiative to harmonize supplier requirements, and was renamed GLOBALG.A.P. in 2007 as it spread worldwide.

Two things make it different from the food-safety schemes a manufacturer knows. First, it certifies primary production, growing, harvesting, and farming, not processing. Second, it is broader than food safety alone: a single IFA audit checks food safety, traceability, environmental impact, worker occupational health and safety, and, for animals, welfare. It is a farm-assurance standard, not just a food-safety standard.

Certification is issued per producer, for a defined product list and location, by a GLOBALG.A.P.-approved certification body that is itself accredited to ISO/IEC 17065. There is no self-declared GLOBALG.A.P. status; the certificate exists only after an on-site audit and carries a unique 13-digit GLOBALG.A.P. Number (GGN) that follows the product and the producer through the supply chain.

What does the Integrated Farm Assurance standard cover?

Integrated Farm Assurance is the core GLOBALG.A.P. standard, and it is built in layers: an All Farm Base that applies to every producer, a scope layer (crops, livestock, or aquaculture), and a sub-scope for the specific product. You get certified to the combination that matches what you produce.

The “integrated” part is the point. A grower who produces both leafy greens and tree fruit is audited once against a shared base plus the relevant sub-scopes, rather than juggling a separate standard for each crop. The three scopes cover:

Everything is audited against control points with matching compliance criteria. The requirements are graded: major musts have to be met without exception, minor musts allow a small percentage of non-compliance, and recommendations are advisory. Miss a single major must and you do not get the certificate until it is closed.

What is GRASP, and is it mandatory?

GRASP, the GLOBALG.A.P. Risk Assessment on Social Practice, is a labor add-on that assesses worker health, safety, and welfare on top of an IFA audit. It looks at social practice: workers’ rights and representation, the presence of a health and safety policy, evidence of legal and complete wage records, working hours, and controls against child and forced labor.

GRASP is not a standalone certificate. It is assessed at the same visit as your IFA audit and reported as a result, not a pass/fail certificate, so a buyer can see your social-practice status alongside your food-safety certificate. Whether it is required depends on the scope and the buyer:

• Aquaculture: GRASP is a mandatory part of the IFA aquaculture audit under the current version 6 of the standard.
• Crops: GRASP is voluntary in the standard itself, but many European retailers make it a purchasing condition, so in practice a lot of produce growers treat it as required.
• GGN label: producers using the consumer-facing GGN label are required to complete GRASP.

If your buyer’s contract mentions “social compliance” or “ethical audit” requirements alongside GLOBALG.A.P., GRASP is usually what closes that gap without a separate labor audit. It is worth confirming in writing before you schedule, because adding GRASP changes what your certification body needs to review.

How do you get GLOBALG.A.P. certified?

The path runs: register, self-assess, fix gaps, then pass an on-site audit by an approved certification body. Producers certify either individually (Option 1) or as a group under a shared quality management system (Option 2), which is how cooperatives and grower groups spread the cost. Most first-time producers follow the same steps.

1. Confirm the exact requirement with your buyer. Pull the specification: which standard version, which sub-scopes, and whether GRASP or any additional module is required. This decides everything downstream.
2. Choose your certification option. Option 1 is a single producer or a producer with multiple sites; Option 2 is a group of producers audited under a central quality management system. Groups need an internal control system and internal auditors.
3. Register with an approved certification body. Certification bodies are approved by GLOBALG.A.P. and accredited to ISO/IEC 17065. Registration issues your GGN.
4. Download the standard and run a self-assessment. Every producer must complete a documented self-assessment against all applicable control points before the external audit. This is not optional paperwork, auditors check it.
5. Close the gaps. Build what is missing: a documented risk assessment for the site, worker health-and-safety controls, hygiene and traceability procedures, pesticide and fertilizer records, water-use assessment, and the record trail that proves they run day to day.
6. Generate records. Most control points require evidence over time, spray logs, harvest records, training sign-offs, calibration of scales and sprayers. Run the system long enough to have real records before the auditor arrives.
7. Pass the on-site audit. The certification body audits the farm, records, and workers against the applicable control points, plus GRASP if included. Any major must has to be closed before certification; minor musts must clear the required threshold.
8. Maintain the certificate. Certificates run on an annual cycle with a surveillance or recertification audit each year, and the standard now includes unannounced audits for a share of producers. Keep the records live between visits.

Why do retailers require GLOBALG.A.P.?

Because it lets a buyer accept produce from thousands of farms worldwide against one known bar, instead of running a separate second-party audit on every grower. For a European supermarket sourcing berries from three continents, a GLOBALG.A.P. certificate and a GGN are a shorthand for “this farm has been audited to a standard we trust.” That is the same logic GFSI applied to manufacturing, applied one step earlier in the chain.

There is a second reason the produce and aquaculture scopes carry weight: they are benchmarked against the GFSI requirements, so a buyer running a GFSI-based supplier program can accept GLOBALG.A.P. at the farm end and a manufacturing scheme like SQF at the plant end, all under one recognition umbrella.

How does GLOBALG.A.P. fit with your other certifications?

It occupies the farm and aquaculture level, where manufacturing standards do not apply. A vertically integrated business, one that grows, packs, and processes, often holds a GLOBALG.A.P. certificate for the farm and packing operation and a separate manufacturing certificate for the processing plant. That is normal; the certificates are not interchangeable across the supply chain.

The engineering underneath is familiar, though. GLOBALG.A.P. leans on the same disciplines as any food-safety system: documented good practices hazard-based risk assessment in the tradition of HACCP and traceability that can follow a lot backward and forward. If your farm sells into the U.S. market, that traceability also has to satisfy FSMA 204 for foods on the Food Traceability List, which pushes many growers toward the same GS1 identifiers retailers already ask for.

The hard part is rarely the standard. It is keeping spray logs, harvest records, worker training, and water tests current and retrievable across a season, on a farm where the “office” is a truck cab. Growers who capture those records digitally at the point of work, instead of on paper that gets rained on and re-entered later, walk into the annual audit with the evidence already sorted. That is the same shift Harmony builds for food and beverage operations: paper logs and checklists become live, searchable records with no rip-and-replace, the way one manufacturer replaced paper production logging and automated its daily reporting. Whatever tool you use, the certificate is the easy part; the record trail is the work.