BRCGS Gluten-Free Issue 4 for Management Course

A gluten-free claim is only as strong as the decisions behind it, and most of those decisions are made far from the production line.

A cheaper oat supplier approved on a questionnaire because the price was right. A shared line kept running wheat and gluten-free product back to back because a dedicated line did not make this year’s budget. A cleaning validation done once, on a different product, and never repeated. A website that calls a product “certified gluten-free”. A team leader appointed in a hurry who has not yet passed the course the Standard names. A recertification audit pushed past its due date so it could run alongside another audit. Each of these is a management decision, and each can cost a site its certificate and the trust of the people who rely on its label.

BRCGS Gluten-Free Issue 4 for Management is a four-hour course for directors, owners, site and operations managers, technical and QA managers, and the procurement, product development and marketing managers whose decisions sit behind a gluten-free claim. It explains what the BRCGS Global Standard Gluten-Free, Issue 4, expects of senior management personally, how the gluten-free management system you fund and lead is judged, which claims and trademarks you may use and on what basis, how an audit result is decided, and how a certificate is won and kept.

What the course covers

Five modules: the Standard and what it expects of management; senior management commitment and the gluten-free management system; suppliers, raw materials, oats and the claims you sign off; operations, testing, incidents and recall; and certification, findings and keeping the claim.

Every module ends with a worked case study from a fictional South African food business, a knowledge check and a scenario game built on decisions a manager actually faces: what to put in scope and which claim route to follow, which supplier to approve and on what evidence, what to do when a gluten test comes back high, and how an audit result reads against the Standard’s table of non-conformities. The course closes with a proctored final assessment: 40 questions drawn at random, so every attempt is different. 45 minutes, 70 percent to pass, 3 attempts. An ASC certificate is issued on passing.

This is an independent ASC Food Safety course explaining the requirements of the BRCGS Global Standard Gluten-Free, Issue 4, in our own words, with clause references so you can look up the exact wording in your own copy of the Standard. It is not a BRCGS course and it is not endorsed by BRCGS. The certificate is a course completion certificate; it is not a BRCGS qualification and does not indicate BRCGS certification of any site or product. It also does not meet clause 1.2.3, which requires your gluten-free management system team leader to have passed the BRCGS Global Standard Gluten-Free Issue 4 Sites Training course. If you are new to the Standard, our Introduction to BRCGS Gluten-Free Issue 4 course walks through the requirements for supervisors and floor teams; this course builds on it for the people who make the decisions.