Vertical Audits Led by Leadership? That’s a Game Changer.

A vertical audit is one of the simplest but most powerful tools in your verification toolbox. It offers a fast, focused way to assess whether your records tell the full story of what’s happening on your production floor.

By following a single product, process, or batch from start to finish, your team gets a clear, end-to-end snapshot of your food safety and quality systems in action.

Vertical audits are extremely powerful, but the real magic happens when your Senior Leadership Team takes the lead.

This training package is built for management teams in food manufacturing. It teaches them how to perform vertical audits: a fast, effective way to verify whether your food safety system is working as intended.

The package includes training for five team members:

  • Three Senior Leadership Team members,
  • Your Food Safety/Quality lead, and
  • An FS/QA alternate.

Training for each team member is online, on-demand, and takes about an hour to complete.

In addition to the training, the package also includes a short briefing for the senior manager to explain:

  • why vertical audits are so powerful, and
  • what their role is in making them successful.

The real value of vertical audits comes when they’re led by the team responsible for daily operations. With buy-in from the senior manager, the team has the support they need to take action, drive improvement, and make real change stick.

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What's Included

  • Training for 3 SLT Members

    Step-by-step guidance on how to conduct a vertical audit and what to look for in records.

  • Training for 2 Food Safety Leads

    Provides additional context to support team implementation and follow-up.

  • Guidance for the Senior Manager

    Outlines the benefits of vertical audits and the plan to involve the full team.

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If your team is larger, no problem - additional training licenses can be added for $70 per person, making it easy to scale the program to fit your facility.

Why Five People?

In a medium-sized organization, five is the minimum number of people to get the ball rolling in this good habit. 

The real boon from this bundle is to support a shift from FS/QA doing everything related to food safety, to working collaboratively on Food Safety.

If all you want is to learn how to do vertical audits and don’t really care if QA does it alone, you’re better off purchasing a single license for our Vertical Audit training. In that case, we’d encourage you to also have a backup trained.

What if There Are More Than Five of Us?

That’s easy. You can purchase additional seats at $70/person for as many team members as you want, as long as they are on your site. 

This is not a backdoor for multi-site discount.

Is Our Plant Manager One of the Five?

That depends!

They certainly can be. And there’s a lot to be said for the site’s Senior Leader to take an active role.

This certainly is a great way to show commitment to Food Safety and a great way to take the pulse of what’s working and what’s not working so well in the organization. 

But a case can also be made for their role to be to hold the team doing the vertical audit accountable, and staying out of it allows them to remain independent and unbiased. 

Bottom line: both approaches are good. Part of the team or in the stands. It’s up to your Plant Manager to decide whether they see value in understanding the nitty gritty or if they are quite happy with the Coles Notes version. They’ll get the Senior Manager briefing no matter what. 

What If We Don't Have Five SLT Members?

An SLT can do a vertical audit together regardless of the size of the team. So the question is not really if you have five members. The real question is whether this offer is for you or not. 

If there are four of you on the team, this package is still less expensive than buying the trainings individually. And you can let one of your Lead Hands or Supervisors take the training. Nothing is lost.  

If there are only three of you, this package is not be the best fit for you. You can buy individual training licenses for your team members, or you can purchase this package and assign the extra seats to other people in your organization.

Explore the Details

How to Perform a Vertical Audit

SLT Member Training

This course gives Managers exactly what they need to know about vertical audits. No fluff. Just the essentials. It’s clear, practical, and easy to follow, with real-world examples that make it stick. Under an hour, and built for busy people.

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Leading a Team in Vertical Audits

Food Safety Lead Training

This advanced course builds on the basics and gives Food Safety Team Leads the tools to lead confidently. It links daily actions to the bigger picture and shows how to integrate vertical audits into a whole-system approach.

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Senior Manager Briefing

guidance to gain buy-in

If the Senior Manager is the captain of the organization, KPIs are the compass they use to guide it. 

The key is to align these KPIs with the organization's goals. The Senior Manager Briefing includes a discussion on KPIs, how they relate to the goal of making safe food every day, and how these indicators should progress over time as the business performance evolves. 

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Watch a Sample of the Training

Why Would the SLT Own Vertical Audits?

In organizations, the SLT manage everything together. That’s how organizations work.

Over-reliance on an internal technical expert is not a sign of a strong organization. 

Each person has a specialty and an area of responsibility. But those lines are never hard and fast. Everybody works together to deliver on all business imperatives: health and safety, cost control, productivity, ESG, HR and so on. Food safety and quality are no exception.  

The work of the FS/QA Lead should not be to hold the other managers accountable. They just don’t have that authority. It should also not be to tell them what’s wrong with their department. That is a recipe for conflict.

What's In It for the SLT?

  1. Better Management: Managing food safety and auditing 
  2. Empowered: Most people don’t like to be told what to do, and let’s face it, that is often what happens in Food Safety. They prefer when expectations are clear, transparent, and everybody is held to the same standard. 
  3. Improved Performance: Catch problems in your department before they get out of hand.
  4. Look Good: Through high performance, both at managing their departments and at supporting other departments during vertical audits.
  5. Fancy Certificate: Who doesn’t like a certificate? 

Should I Tell My Plant Manager "You Have To Do This"?

A lot of FS/QA Leads would love to be able to tell their Plant Manager, "You have to do this!"

But that’s not how things work.

That shortcut might look like a nice workaround, but it will work against you in the long term.

It’s much better to convince them of the value in this package. That’s our role.

How It Works

  • Purchase the training package online and you’ll receive an email with everything you need to roll it out to your team.

  • When you’re ready to roll out the training, complete a short form with your team’s info so we can get everyone enrolled in the right training path.

  • Each participant gets access to their training with progress tracking and optional reporting so you can monitor completion.

  • With your team trained and aligned, you’re ready to launch. Start performing vertical audits regularly and see results right away.

What Your Team Gains

Sharper Oversight

Senior leaders learn to spot gaps - fast.

Vertical audits train your leadership team to quickly assess how well your systems are working on the ground, giving you real-time insights without waiting for an external audit.

Stronger Team Alignment

Everyone knows their role and why it matters.

This package helps build accountability across departments, clarifying expectations and connecting day-to-day operations with leadership priorities.

Smarter Verification

Take your internal audit program up a notch.

With KPIs and a structured approach, vertical audits shift your program from box-checking to a meaningful look at performance over time.

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Leadership Driven Audits Start Here

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