How to get the Standard

The Food Made Good Standard is the global gold standard for measuring progress across the industry.

This evaluation of operations sets out what ‘good’ looks like, rewards action over intention and provides businesses with a thorough and tailored action plan for improvement. It also provides a credible way for you to share your sustainability work with team members, customers and other stakeholders.

Find out more below.

6 simple steps to getting started

Food Made Good is designed for all F&B businesses. From high street to high end, we work with restaurants, hotels, caterers, bars, cafés, pubs — even train networks, airport lounges and cinemas! — around the world.

Sign up

The first step is to create an account for you and your business. We also take payment at this stage. For details on our pricing, click here.

Complete the assessment

You can complete the assessment at your own pace, delegate questions to your team and manage your evidence all within the online tool.

The Standard:

is around 250 questions
is tailored to your business size and type
consists of 12 sections: the 10 impact areas of the Food Made Good Framework, an 'About Your Business' section and a standalone section about your communications called “Using Your Influence”

There is no limit to the number of times you can modify an un-submitted assessment. This allows you to use the questionnaire to see what your likely impact and score will be, without having to undergo the full evaluation process.

Submit your assessment for evaluation

Once you submit your assessment, our evaluators will get to work.

Preliminary evaluation

We’ll review your submission, checking your evidence and flagging any queries or additional information that we need from you.

Feedback

Once you’ve fed back on our comments, answering our questions and providing further evidence where needed, we’ll do a final check and then issue your final report and score.

Your results and final report

At the end of the evaluation process, you’ll receive your final score and a personalised report containing suggested actions to help you go further. If you've scored 50% or higher, you've achieved the Food Made Good Standard and are now part of a growing global community. You'll be awarded a logo with the number of stars you have achieved, and our Marketing & Communications team will follow up within the next couple of weeks to offer our support in getting the word out!

This report takes two forms:

A downloadable PDF with your score and the key actions to put in place
A more detailed set of suggestions by question that you can view on your Food Made Good account

To maintain the validity of your Food Made Good Standard, you must resubmit every two years.

HOW WE VERIFY YOUR ANSWERS

Every FMG submission goes through a structured verification process. This ensures certification results are accurate and consistent for all businesses. For European clients, this is carried out by third-party auditors Intertek. For non-European businesses, verification is carried out by The SRA, though third-party audit through Intertek is also available on request. Get in touch with us if this is of interest.

1. CHECKS ON THE HIGHEST-IMPACT QUESTIONS

Some questions carry more weight than others, reflecting the issues that have the biggest potential social and/or environmental impacts. Answers to the highest impact questions are checked closely against the evidence submitted and against evaluator guidance.

2. SAMPLE CHECKS ON OTHER QUESTIONS

For the remaining questions, a proportion of answers is checked at random for every submission, so businesses cannot predict which ones will be reviewed. Additional answers may also be flagged based on risk indicators, such as a business's profile, a large change in score since the last assessment, or third-party certification claims.

3. HOW ANSWERS ARE VERIFIED

For each answer selected for review, the evaluator assesses the evidence submitted against relevant risk indicators and expected practice for the business type and sustainability issue being addressed. The evaluator also checks for inconsistencies with other answers and may review publicly available information such as the business's website, social media, or supplier websites. Where needed, the evaluator will also ask the business directly for further explanation during preliminary evaluation.

4. CONSISTENT STANDARDS

Evaluators use guidance documents that set out typical score ranges and practice profiles for different business types and sizes to ensure consistent evaluation across all submissions.

A helping hand

Did you know that we offer supported and facilitated packages for businesses that would like additional assistance in taking the Food Made Good Standard?

Our competitively priced packages are designed to streamline the process as much as possible, with our expert consultants guiding you every step of the way. We can assist in engaging internal stakeholders through interviews and surveys, providing references to relevant supporting materials, facilitating the collection of necessary evidence and offering a highly detailed analysis and report of your results, giving you a tailor-made roadmap for improvement.

For more information about these packages, please get in touch at standard@thesra.org.