Updated April 14, 2023

Under the Foreign Supplier Verification Program (FSVP) Rule, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires most U.S. importers to develop FSVPs to provide adequate assurances that their foreign suppliers are producing food that is safe for consumption.

Importers are responsible for gathering supplier compliance data and using that data to verify and approve suppliers. Importers must remain up to date on the compliance status of all their suppliers to take corrective actions and adhere to FSVP requirements.

Obtaining the data you need to efficiently track your suppliers’ compliance is time and resource-consuming. With many other business tasks to attend to, you may wonder how you can make FSVP compliance easier and more efficient.

Keep reading for easy ways to streamline FSVP compliance at your company.

Automate Compliance Alerts

Though essential to complying with FSVP requirements, monitoring supplier compliance is challenging. FDA has several databases that contain supplier compliance information.

This information is not automatically shared with FSVP Importers, and you need to regularly scour each relevant database and search for each supplier individually to find their information.

You are required to maintain awareness about enforcement actions FDA has issued against your suppliers, such as Import Alerts, Warning Letters, and Import Refusals. You must take corrective actions as applicable, to ensure the food safety issues have been resolved before you import the food.

If you continue shipping from a non-compliant supplier, FDA will take enforcement action against your company.

To make staying informed more productive, you can use a platform that automates compliance alerts. Registrar Corp’s Automated Compliance solution is a comprehensive platform for prudent importers and exporters wanting to stay FDA-compliant and proactively avoid supply chain disruptions.

Within Automated Compliance, our Compliance Monitor tool aggregates data from government databases to send you important updates in real time. Using a system customized to make FDA compliance easier can save you hours of work and reduce unnecessary strain on your resources.

Maintain Records Digitally, in One Place

The FSVP rule requires documentation that demonstrates compliance for each food imported per supplier. These documents must be updated at least every 3 years, or whenever significant supplier information changes, such as the facility’s address or when  a new ingredient or process is incorporated thus affecting the hazard analysis or other evaluations in the FSVP.

Relying only on physical files can lead to missing documents, causing you to sacrifice both time and manpower to retrieve required documentation. Maintaining physical files also likely requires additional administrative support to keep files organized and make them available to FDA upon request.

The challenges increase as a company adds additional suppliers, which all require separate FSVPs and separate documentation.

Due to remote inspections, FDA has been requesting documents in digital form, either via email or by uploading to FDA’s FSVP Importer Portal for FSVP Records. Maintaining a digital file system is more efficient and will ensure all files are in one location.

To streamline a digital file system for your FSVP documents, you can use a system that is integrated into the platform you are already using to track FSVP compliance.

For example, the Document Management System (DMS), included in the Automated Compliance platform, is a digital file system that helps you manage Food Safety Plans, audit reports, process documentation, and more. You can also request and receive suppliers’ documents directly through the DMS and automatically re-request documents when they near expiration.

Check Supplier’s FSVP Compliance Before You Buy

You can be more confident that a potential supplier will be reliable by checking their compliance history before you decide to work with them. Importers are required to continuously verify their suppliers’ compliance and re-evaluate and/or revoke approval of a supplier that has fallen out of compliance until the issue has been resolved.

If a supplier has a strong and lengthy track record of outstanding FDA compliance, they are more likely to remain compliant than a company that has been subject to several FDA enforcement actions. Non-compliant suppliers can cause import delays, major losses in productivity, and more importantly cause consumer illness if unsafe food is distributed.

When a supplier falls out of compliance, you need to take corrective actions. You may need to allocate resources to finding a replacement, recouping financial losses, and implementing damage control to protect your brand’s reputation and consumers.

To get a clear idea of a supplier’s compliance record, you can use an evaluation tool like Regiscore, a feature of the Monitor that generates scores for suppliers based on their FDA compliance and shipment history. By only importing from suppliers with high Regiscores, you can reduce the likelihood of importing from an unreliable supplier.

Importers can also quickly and efficiently identify new products with Registrar Corp’s Marketplace tool. Marketplace contains thousands of international suppliers’ information, along with their compliance status and historical shipment data, so importers can easily find the products they need and the suppliers they want to do business with on one platform.