BRC Consultant Comparison: Certify vs. Kellerman

Picking a BRC consultant is not like picking a caterer. You're not choosing based on menu variety or price alone — you're choosing based on whether the person across the table has actually sat across from a certification body auditor and watched a client either pass or take a critical non-conformity to the chin. If you've searched "Certify Consulting vs. Kellerman Consulting," you're probably past the "what is BRCGS" stage and into the "who do I actually hire" stage. Fair question. Let's answer it properly, starting with what the standard demands before we get to who's best positioned to help you meet it.

What BRCGS Food Safety Certification Actually Requires

Per BRCGS's own transition guidance, Food Safety Issue 9 was published in August 2022 and became mandatory for all audits conducted from February 1, 2023. If your last audit cited "Issue 8," that cycle is closed — every current audit runs against Issue 9.

The standard is built around seven sections: senior management commitment, the food safety plan (HACCP), the food safety and quality management system, site standards, product control, process control, and personnel. A consultant who understands BRCGS understands that those seven sections aren't independent checkboxes. A weak HACCP plan in Section 2 will surface again in Section 6 as a process control gap. It shows up again in Section 4 as a site standards finding. The standard is designed to catch the same failure from three angles.

The part that catches first-time applicants off guard is the grading system. BRCGS audits produce non-conformities graded critical, major, or minor, and a single critical finding blocks certification outright regardless of how clean the rest of the audit was. Facilities are then graded AA, A, B, C, or D based on the number and severity of everything else. A consultant's real job isn't filling out a binder — it's making sure nothing in your operation is sitting at "critical" risk before the auditor ever walks in.

BRCGS is one of the schemes benchmarked by the Global Food Safety Initiative, alongside SQF and FSSC 22000, which is why a lot of facilities end up comparing BRC consultants and GFSI consultants in the same breath. If you're still deciding which scheme fits your operation rather than just which consultant fits BRCGS specifically, our BRC vs. SQF vs. HACCP breakdown is the place to start before you lock in a scheme and then a consultant.

How to Evaluate a BRC Consultant

Before comparing any two firms by name, it helps to have a fixed set of criteria — otherwise the comparison turns into a beauty contest instead of a fit assessment. Here's what I'd actually check, in order:

• Does the consultant work across multiple GFSI schemes, or only BRCGS? Multi-scheme experience matters because most of the gap analysis — HACCP validation, allergen control, foreign material management — is identical whether the target is BRCGS, SQF, or FSSC 22000. A consultant who's only ever prepped BRCGS audits has a narrower reference set to draw from when your facility's gap doesn't match the standard textbook case.
• Is there a single point of contact through the engagement, or does the file get handed between people? Continuity matters more in BRCGS prep than in most compliance work because the standard's internal cross-references mean the person reviewing your HACCP plan needs to already know what they found in your site standards walkthrough.
• What credentials does the lead consultant actually hold? Look for quality-system credentials (ASQ's CQA or CMQ-OE), not just "food safety experience" as a phrase on a website.
• Does the firm offer ancillary regulatory support — FDA registration, labeling review, ISO 22000 — or does it stop at the GFSI scheme? Facilities rarely have a single compliance need in isolation.
• How is the engagement structured — a fixed-scope gap assessment, ongoing retainer, or audit-day support only?

Certify Consulting and Kellerman Consulting both operate in the GFSI consulting space and both list BRCGS among their service lines. Here's how they actually compare against that checklist.

Certify Consulting for BRC Certification Prep

Certify Consulting is a full-service quality and regulatory consultancy led by Jared Clark, JD, MBA, PMP, CMQ-OE, CQA, CPGP, RAC. That credential stack matters for BRCGS work specifically because the standard sits at the intersection of legal compliance (food safety law), quality management systems (Section 3), and process engineering (Sections 5 and 6). A consultant with a law degree, a project management credential, and ASQ's quality auditor and quality/organizational excellence certifications is built to move across all three without handing you off to a different specialist for each section.

Certify's food safety practice doesn't treat BRCGS as an isolated service line. The firm works across BRCGS, SQF, FSSC 22000, and HACCP. That means a facility that starts a BRCGS gap assessment and discovers mid-engagement that SQF is actually the better fit for its retail customer base doesn't have to restart with a new consultant — the underlying food safety plan work carries over. That overlap is deliberate: HACCP is the load-bearing document under every GFSI scheme, and Certify's HACCP consulting practice exists precisely because a shaky HACCP plan is the single most common root cause behind a failed BRCGS audit.

Certify also runs adjacent regulatory work — FDA registration, ISO 22000, cosmetics and dietary supplement GMP — under one roof, which matters for co-manufacturers and private-label facilities that need BRCGS certification but also carry FDA registration obligations or export requirements that BRCGS alone doesn't touch. For a full look at how Certify scopes a BRC engagement specifically, the BRC consultant service page lays out the gap-assessment-to-certification process in more detail.

Kellerman Consulting for BRC Certification Prep

According to Kellerman Consulting's own service pages, the firm is a food and beverage regulatory and quality consulting firm that also offers BRCGS preparation, typically as part of a broader service list that includes SQF, organic (NOP) certification, FDA registration, and label compliance review. Like Certify, Kellerman positions itself as a multi-scheme GFSI consultancy rather than a single-standard specialist, which is generally the right model for BRCGS work given how much a facility's HACCP and quality-system documentation gets reused across schemes.

I'll be straightforward about the limits of this comparison: Kellerman doesn't publish the same level of individual consultant credentialing on its site that would let a prospective client verify ASQ certifications, legal credentials, or specific audit-side experience the way Certify does. That's not necessarily a mark against the firm's actual delivery — plenty of solid consultancies simply market differently. But it does mean a facility evaluating Kellerman on paper has less to independently check than a facility evaluating Certify. Certify's credential stack (JD, MBA, PMP, CMQ-OE, CQA, CPGP, RAC) is disclosed and verifiable against ASQ's and the relevant licensing bodies' public records.

Certify vs. Kellerman: Side-by-Side

That table isn't exhaustive, and it isn't symmetrical: two of the seven rows for Kellerman read "not specified publicly" or "not itemized" because that's what Kellerman discloses on its own site, not because the firm lacks those capabilities. No comparison of two consulting firms is ever fully even, since so much of the actual engagement quality comes down to the specific person assigned to your file, not the firm's marketing page. Use it as a starting filter — and where a row is blank for Kellerman, treat that as a question to ask them directly, not a verdict.

Which Consultant Fits Your Facility

Here's where I'd actually land, depending on what your facility looks like going in.

If you're a co-manufacturer or private-label facility that needs BRCGS certification and also carries FDA food facility registration, exports product internationally, or is weighing ISO 22000 alongside BRCGS for a customer that asks for both — you want a consultant whose practice already spans those areas, because the gap analysis interview only needs to happen once. That's the case Certify is built around.

If your primary need is BRCGS plus organic certification and your compliance picture is otherwise fairly contained, Kellerman's bundled GFSI-plus-organic model may line up more directly with what you need, and it's worth a direct conversation with them to see how their engagement is structured.

If you genuinely don't know yet whether BRCGS is the right scheme for your customer base versus SQF, that's a decision that should happen before you sign with either firm. Pull the supplier-requirements language from your top three retail or foodservice contracts first — most spell out a specific GFSI scheme or accept any GFSI-benchmarked certification, and that contractual language, not your own preference, is what should decide it. A consultant who works across both schemes can confirm which reading applies before you sign. Our GFSI consultant overview walks through how retailers and buyers actually choose between the recognized schemes in more detail.

One thing I'd push back on: don't pick a BRCGS consultant purely because they're the cheapest gap assessment quote you got. The standard's critical-non-conformity rule means a rushed or shallow gap assessment doesn't just risk a lower letter grade — it risks a failed audit and a re-audit fee on top of whatever you saved on the front end. Ask any consultant you're evaluating, Certify or Kellerman or anyone else, to walk you through exactly how they'd handle a critical finding discovered two weeks before your scheduled audit date. A specific answer names a corrective-action timeline — typically closing the gap within five to ten business days and re-verifying it, on-site or via documentation, before the auditor arrives; a vague answer settles for "we'd work with you." That difference tells you more about fit than any service list will.

FAQ

What's the difference between BRC and BRCGS?

BRC was the original name under the British Retail Consortium. The standard is now branded BRCGS; per BRCGS's own history page, LGC acquired the BRCGS standards business in 2021. "BRC" and "BRCGS" refer to the same certification family — most people in the industry still use them interchangeably.

Does a BRC consultant need to specialize only in BRCGS?

No, and in practice it's usually better if they don't. Because BRCGS shares a HACCP and quality-management-system foundation with SQF and FSSC 22000, a consultant who works across multiple GFSI schemes brings a wider reference set for solving the same underlying gaps — allergen control, foreign material management, traceability — that show up regardless of which scheme you're certifying against.

How long does BRCGS Issue 9 certification prep typically take?

Timelines depend heavily on where your facility's food safety plan and quality management system currently stand, but a facility with an established HACCP plan and documented QMS is in a very different position than one building both from scratch. A proper gap assessment early in the engagement is what turns that variable into an actual timeline.

What happens if a critical non-conformity turns up during a BRC audit?

A single critical non-conformity blocks certification for that audit cycle, regardless of how the rest of the facility scored. This is why the gap assessment phase before the actual audit matters more in BRCGS prep than in almost any other part of the engagement — catching what would be graded critical before the auditor does is the entire point of hiring a consultant.

Can I switch from a BRCGS track to SQF partway through an engagement?

Yes, and it's more common than people expect, usually because a customer's requirements shift mid-process. Because both schemes are GFSI-benchmarked and rely on the same underlying HACCP plan, a consultant working across both schemes can pivot the engagement without starting the food safety plan work over.

Last updated: 2026-09-01