Social Responsibility Audits

NSF’s global team of industry-leading technical experts can help you implement responsible business practices that demonstrate your commitment to sustainability and a transparent and ethical supply chain. We bring our global expertise to the local level and provide:

• Supplier assessments: We conduct assessments to verify compliance by prioritizing rigor and efficiency while leveraging existing audit and compliance procedures for your suppliers.
• Responsible sourcing strategy development: We create a strategy that helps manage supply chain risks, protect security of supply and enhance brand reputation.
• Risk assessment or audit: We assess your supply chain to help you understand and map your vulnerabilities.
• Roadmap design: We help you define objectives to guide your business to your responsibility targets.
• Modern slavery: We can advise on your obligatory modern slavery statement, assess risk and surface issues. We offer training tools to raise awareness of the issue with your employees and supply chain.
• Due Diligence: To assist in the screening and selection of new supply chain partners or investments, NSF can assist in the creation, investigation and corrective action analysis of social welfare criteria for key partners.

Save time and money by streamlining regional and industry-specific social responsibility audits:

Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit (SMETA)

Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit (SMETA) is a widely recognized global social compliance scheme. Based on the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI) Base Code, SMETA is the Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit methodology that a business can use to monitor its supply chain by assessing the risk in a supplier’s working conditions across the areas of labor, health and safety, environment, and business ethics.  

NSF is an Affiliate Audit Company (AAC) of Sedex. Sedex is one of the world’s leading collaborative platforms for buyers and suppliers to store, share and report on ethical and social audit information quickly and easily. Being granted AAC approval indicates NSF’s commitment to correctly using ETA (Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit), the Sedex social audit methodology, and to conducting audits with quality and integrity.

Sedex has more than 55,000 members in 180 countries, and its AACs have conducted over 280,000 audits worldwide. NSF can guide you through the process, assisting you with your self-assessment or conducting your audit to demonstrate your adherence to good labor, health and safety, environmental, and business practices.

Sustainability Initiative of South Africa (SIZA)

This holistic offering identifies problems, usually through an independent third-party audit, and provides appropriate support and interventions, including awareness-raising and relevant capacity-building programs. SIZA is a South African social compliance standard developed, owned and operated in South Africa but aligned to global best practices for supply chain monitoring of labor, health and safety, and working conditions. SIZA also operates in Namibia.

The program aims at monitoring compliance and focuses on continuous improvement. Its objective is to encourage continuous improvement in practices over time, going beyond the minimum legal requirements. SIZA engages directly with our stakeholders throughout the value chain to manage risks and identify needs and issues. Interventions and support tools are created by measuring member compliance over time. SIZA provides a platform for agricultural stakeholders to ensure ethical sustainable trade. SIZA social audits can also be visible on other platforms, like Sedex Advance. SIZA is benchmarked against Sedex.

The Wine and Agriculture Ethical Trade Association (WIETA)

The Wine and Agriculture Ethical Trade Association (WIETA) is a South African social compliance code that can be used to drive a proactive and sustainable ethical trade program for the South African wine industry and related sectors. The Ethical Code of conduct serves as a rigorous framework through which its members and their supply chains are monitored. Social audits not only serve as a primary monitoring tool to measure legal compliance with South Africa’s labor and occupational health and safety legislation, but also go beyond compliance requirements to ensure that a company’s management systems reflect sustainable, ethical principles, policies and practices. 

GLOBALG.A.P. Risk Assessment on Social Practice (GRASP)

This is a risk assessment of social practices on the farm, focused on workers’ health, safety and welfare. Designed to complement GLOBALG.A.P. certification, GRASP has helped 50,000-plus producers upgrade their good social practices, assess their social management systems and demonstrate their compliance to their buyers. Visit our GLOBALG.A.P. page for more information.

You can find the APSCA Code of Conduct here.

If you want to report unethical behavior and misconduct against the APSCA Code of Conduct, please access our Code of Ethics and the no-retaliation policy. To submit a confidential, anonymous report online, go to nsf.ethicspoint.com.

NSF strictly prohibits any form of retaliation against any employee, auditor, independent contractor, or partner organization as a result of a report of a potential violation of this Policy or as a result of cooperating in an investigation of a suspected violation of this Policy.

The Chief Legal Officer is responsible for the administration of this Code of Ethics under the governance of the Audit Committee of NSF's Board of Directors.