A mark is worth nothing if the register is not public.
Twelve holders, each with the date they were last audited and the date they are next due. Two of them are currently lapsed. You can see which two, which is the entire point of publishing a register rather than a logo.
The register, in full.
Sorted by nothing in particular. A register that puts the lapses at the bottom is a marketing page wearing a register’s clothes.
Status is set by the audit date and nothing else. Current means audited inside twelve months. Due means the anniversary is inside sixty days. Lapsed means the date has gone past and the holder may not use the mark until it is re-audited.
Why the register is the product, and the mark is just a sticker.
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Anybody can print a logo.
There are several hundred food marks in the United Kingdom and a meaningful number of them mean nothing at all. The reason is always the same: the scheme publishes the badge and does not publish the list.
If you cannot look up a holder, cannot see when they were last checked, and cannot see anybody who has failed, then the badge is a graphic design decision with a subscription attached.
A mark with no public register is a sticker with an invoice behind it.
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So the register comes first and the mark second.
This scheme was built backwards on purpose. The register existed before the mark did, and a holder is added to the register on the day of the audit rather than on the day they pay.
The visible consequence is uncomfortable and correct: two of twelve holders are lapsed today, and both are still listed. They come off the shelf, not off the page.
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Lapsed is a status, not a deletion.
The easy thing to do with a lapsed holder is to remove the row, leaving a register on which everybody has always passed. That is how most schemes end up with a hundred per cent pass rate and no credibility.
A lapse usually means a small producer has had a bad quarter and has not been able to take a day out for an audit, not that anything is wrong with the food. Saying so is more useful than hiding it.
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And the mark buys nothing here.
Holding it does not get a producer better shelf position, a higher price, or preferential ordering. There is no fee for the audit and no fee for the mark. If there were, the register would be a list of who paid.
The day the mark costs money is the day it stops meaning anything.
The register, in numbers.
What the mark does not claim
It is not an organic certification, not a food safety certification, and not a substitute for either. Environmental Health rates food hygiene and the Soil Association rates organic status; neither of those is us and we do not duplicate them. This mark says one thing only: somebody from this estate has been to the premises, looked at the process, checked the claims on the label against the reality, and written down what they found.
The questions this register gets.
No. There is no fee at any point, which is the only structural reason to believe the register.
They stop using the mark on packaging and shelf cards until they are re-audited. They do not automatically stop supplying us — a lapsed audit is an administrative state, not a food safety finding.
Two have failed a first audit and both passed on the second visit within ninety days. One withdrew before the audit rather than take it, which is its own answer and is why the register has twelve rows rather than thirteen.
By nobody at all. It is a private mark operated by a farm shop in Oxfordshire, and anyone treating it as a regulatory approval has misunderstood it.
Who is inside the radius.
Thirteen producers, all of them within eleven miles of the shop door.
