How to prepare for an FSAI inspection
, what they check, and a two-week plan.

Who actually walks through your door

The FSAI is the central competent authority, but most inspections are performed by its official agencies under service contract: HSE Environmental Health Officers for general food businesses, the Department of Agriculture (DAFM) for approved meat, dairy and egg establishments, the SFPA for seafood, and local authorities for certain sectors. The legal framework is EU Regulation 2017/625 on official controls, and inspectors generally arrive unannounced or at short notice.

The inspection frequency is risk-based: your compliance history, the nature of the product and the scale of the operation set how often you are visited. A clean record buys you longer intervals; enforcement history buys you the opposite.

The documents requested in the first half hour

The traceability question, and how it is asked

A standard inspection move is to pick a product, from your chill, your dispatch bay or a customer's shelf, and ask two questions: where did the ingredients in this come from, and who did you supply this lot to? Under Article 18 of EU food safety regulations you must answer both on demand; inspectors expect the answer in minutes-to-hours, not days.

The follow-up, if your answer is slow or vague, is a request for a recall procedure walk-through under Article 19: what would you do right now if this lot were unsafe? The businesses that struggle are rarely missing records, they are missing the connections between records, so the answer requires assembling three books and a phone call to whoever was on shift.

What the walk-through covers

The two-week readiness plan

1. 1
   Days 1–2: run a self-audit against your last report

   Reread the last inspection report or audit and verify every previous finding is closed with evidence. Repeat findings are what escalate enforcement.
2. 2
   Days 3–4: pull the first-30-minutes pack

   Registration, HACCP records, training matrix, supplier list, current monitoring logs, one folder (physical or digital) that anyone can hand over.
3. 3
   Days 5–7: run a timed traceability exercise

   One product forward, one ingredient backward, timed and written up. Fix the gaps it exposes, it will expose some.
4. 4
   Days 8–9: walk the floor as an inspector

   Someone senior walks the site with fresh eyes: condensation, open bins, unlabelled tubs, propped fire doors, undated cleaning sign-offs.
5. 5
   Days 10–12: close the small stuff

   The findings from the walk, most are fixable in a day and disproportionately shape the inspector's impression.
6. 6
   Days 13–14: brief the team

   Everyone should know who greets an inspector, where the document pack lives, and that the correct answer to an unknown question is to fetch the person who knows, never to guess.

After the inspection

Findings arrive on a spectrum: verbal advice, written reports with corrective actions, improvement notices, and, for serious risk, closure orders or prohibition orders, which the FSAI publishes monthly. Respond to every written finding in writing, with dates and evidence of closure; the response file becomes the first thing checked next visit.

Producers running Keystone keep the traceability half of inspection-readiness permanent by default, any batch's full chain in under 30 seconds, monitoring and QC records attached to the batch they belong to, which converts the two-week plan above into a walk-the-floor exercise. The floor still has to be right; software doesn't clean drains.