SFDA food facility requirements

The HACCP certificate is a separate step from writing the plan. A certification body needs a plan that exists, prerequisite programmes that run, and records that show both working. Your documentation (manual, procedures, forms): within a week of the gap analysis. Then your team runs it. Before the certification audit, that means at least one internal audit and one management review, with the records to show them. You and your certification body set the pace.

Two words in the requirement carry weight. Accredited means the certification body holds accreditation for that scheme from a recognised accreditation body. Certificate means the audited outcome, not a training certificate held by a staff member and not a consultant's letter of conformity. Confusing a HACCP training certificate with a HACCP system certificate is a common and expensive error.

Build the sequence backwards from this. If the facility is due to commission in nine months, the HACCP system needs to be running with records well before that, which means the plan is being written now.

The route below follows SFDA's food investor guide for a food manufacturer. Which site-approval row applies depends on where the facility sits: a municipal authority for an ordinary site, an agricultural authority for an agricultural one, or the industrial city's own authority inside an industrial, economic or royal commission city.

The Food Law and its implementing regulations are worth reading once rather than summarised forever. Four obligations sit inside them that catch established businesses as often as new ones: products are registered with SFDA separately from the facility, records must support traceability, SFDA may inspect, sample and seize, and there is a framework for both voluntary and mandatory recall.

Facility licensing and product registration are different obligations with different evidence. Holding one does not satisfy the other, and a facility that has been licensed for years can still have an unregistered product on a shelf.

Category A carries the highest annual inspection fee and category C the lowest. The licence runs a minimum of one year and a maximum of three, so a longer licence multiplies the inspection fee. Food warehouses and distribution centres pay a registration fee and an inspection fee. Feed manufacturer and feed warehouse licensing carry no fee.

A warehouse tenant who does not own the premises is limited to a one-year licence, which is worth knowing before a three-year lease is signed on the assumption the licence will match it.

The distinction matters because facility grading scales circulate widely in this market, quoted confidently, sometimes with an inspection frequency attached to each band. We could not trace any of them to an SFDA document. If you have been shown one, ask which circular or regulation it comes from before you plan around it.

Plan against what is documented, which is the fee banding, and take anything else directly from SFDA or from your inspector rather than from a marketing page. We will extend this page when a primary source appears.

Buy the texts that apply to you. They are sold through SFDA's standards portal, and the difference between a facility that has read them and one that has not is visible within an hour of an inspector arriving.

These come from SFDA's licensing guide and from circular No. 34442 dated 18/12/1445H, and they are enforced against the warehouse operator as well as the tenant. The notification rule is the one that catches operators: the lessor must notify SFDA of contracts by email within fourteen working days of signing. A warehouse with twelve tenants and no notification trail has twelve exposures, not one.

In leased third-party storage, neither the tenant nor the operator may package or label product inside the warehouse. Expired product moves to a designated area immediately and must not sit there longer than a year. And the warehouse runs a receipt-and-distribution tracking system, with readiness to connect to SFDA electronically.