AMedP-4.5 food processor and supplier audits

What it is

What AMedP-4.5 covers

AMedP-4.5 is the NATO Allied Medical Publication that sets out how a food processor, manufacturer or supplier feeding a military force on operations is audited for food safety and quality, and how the risk that audit uncovers is assessed and shared. It does not itself lay down product specifications or purchase requirements. It is written, in its own words, "meant to be used by food auditors as a guide for the level of detail and areas of interest that should be included in the audit", so that one nation's audit of an establishment can be exchanged with, and relied on by, another participating nation rather than repeated from scratch.

Who audits, and who is audited

The document names two roles. The auditor is expected to be a Military Veterinarian, or someone with "a meaningful amount of academic training in food safety and quality management systems, as well as sufficient experience doing food safety audits", identified in the report by name, rank, unit and nation. The auditee is the food processor, manufacturer or supplier: the document's own aim is to "establish the minimum requirements for military contracted food suppliers, processors, manufacturers based on Good Manufacturing Practices", and it provides two report templates, a full one for processors and manufacturers with their own production, and a shorter one covering only the requirements that apply to a supplier that has none.

How the audit runs, and how risk is assessed

An audit combines a documentary review with a site visit: the auditor checks the organisation's records but also walks the storage areas, sanitary installations and production facilities, using techniques such as sampling and interviews. Chapter 3 sets out what is examined, organised under eight headings: the supplier's quality management system, its HACCP-based food-safety controls, personnel competence and hygiene, infrastructure and site design, process control through every stage from raw-material intake to finished-product dispatch, cleaning and pest management, transport, and food defence against deliberate tampering. Risk is assessed by weighing what the audit finds under those headings against the operational agreement that "health related risks and quality of food should be assessed when selecting suppliers", rather than by a numeric score. Every audit closes with an overall recommendation, positive, negative or conditional, and any non-conformity is classed by how directly it threatens food safety: a Critical finding, a Major finding, or an Observation. A conditional result carries the corrective action the auditee has agreed to take and the timescale for taking it. This page describes that structure and stops there; what any individual audit question actually asks, and the criteria used to judge the answer, are the kind of operational detail this page does not reproduce.

Its relationship to HACCP and Codex Alimentarius

AMedP-4.5 does not set its own food-safety methodology. It expects the audited organisation's food-safety control system to be "a HACCP plan, which is systematic, comprehensive, thorough and based on the Codex Alimentarius HACCP principles", and asks, where no such plan exists, for a detailed account of how hazards are controlled by other means. HACCP built on Codex Alimentarius is therefore the expected baseline the audit checks against, not a scheme AMedP-4.5 replaces or competes with. The document does not name ISO 22000, a GFSI-recognised scheme, or EU hygiene law, so this page does not either.

How it comes to bind, and where it has force

AMedP-4.5 binds through STANAG 2556: "the agreement of nations to use this publication is recorded in" that STANAG. For an individual company, the practical trigger is being, or seeking to become, a "military contracted" food supplier or processor to a NATO or partner nation; the audit criteria then stay relevant for as long as that contract runs, since a nation is notified if another finds that a company supplying it "does not meet these minimum standards" at any point, not only at the outset. Reach is not uniform across NATO. Recorded national reservations show real variation: one nation has stated it will not implement the document because national law gives food-supplier oversight to a civil food-safety agency rather than the military; another has recorded that it follows equivalent principles through good manufacturing and hygiene practice, Codex Alimentarius and hazard analysis and critical control points under its own national and EU-based legislation instead of this publication directly; and a third has recorded that while it treats the underlying principles as important, civil authorities rather than the military carry out parts of the work nationally. None of that is a general answer to whether AMedP-4.5 applies to a given company; that depends on the contract and the customer nation involved.

How you are evaluated

There is no certification against AMedP-4.5. The document states plainly that it "is not used to determine an establishment's capabilities to comply with product specifications or other purchase requirements": it exists so that participating nations can share what an audit has already found, "so each Nation can make its own appreciation and judgement without having to perform a site audit" themselves. The assessment is an audit run by the buying nation's own qualified personnel, not a scheme operated by an accredited certification body, and its outcome is a recommendation and an information exchange between nations, not a certificate. The one accreditation the document does mention sits a level down: where a food processor or supplier subcontracts safety-critical analyses, "a competent accreditation body shall independently certify the third-party laboratory" carrying out that testing, a certificate held by the laboratory against laboratory accreditation criteria, not by the audited processor or supplier against AMedP-4.5.

Standards it references

• AMedP-4.12Background