Your SALSA Audit Changes on 1 September. Your Evidence Started Months Ago.

New issues of all four SALSA standards became available on 1 June 2026. From 1 September 2026, every SALSA audit will be conducted against them. For the Food and Drink Production standard, that means Issue 7.

Most preparation for a transition like this goes into documentation. Procedures are reviewed, policies reissued, the self-assessment worked through section by section. That work is necessary and SALSA has published member resources to support it, including a clause-by-clause interpretation guide and a digital self-assessment tool.

It is also the part that can be completed in August.

Pest evidence cannot. An audit conducted in October examines the preceding period of operation, and that period is running now. Whatever the revised requirements ask of a pest management programme, the records available to answer them are the ones being generated this month and next. A procedure can be rewritten in an afternoon. A trend cannot be reconstructed retrospectively without the underlying visits having recorded the right things at the time.

This is the part of a standards transition that most reliably catches sites out, and it has nothing to do with which clause changed.

What the outgoing issue already required

It is worth being precise about the baseline, because a surprising number of sites are not meeting it before any revision is considered.

Issue 6 required that inspection records be kept, including details of pest activity, treatments undertaken at individual control points, and actions taken in response to recommendations made by the pest control contractor. It further required that the results of pest control inspections be assessed and analysed for trends at least annually.

Read that second requirement carefully. It is not satisfied by a folder of visit reports. Trend analysis requires that activity be recorded consistently enough across visits to be compared, and that somebody has actually performed the comparison and can show the output. A site holding twelve reports has raw material. It does not necessarily hold the analysis.

The first requirement is the one that fails more often. Actions taken in response to contractor recommendations. Not the recommendations themselves, which appear reliably on every report, but what was done about them. A recommendation to seal a gap, repeated across four consecutive visits without a record of who owned it or whether it was completed, is evidence of a recommendation being made. It is also evidence that nothing happened, and an auditor reading four identical entries will draw the obvious conclusion.

The practical position before September

Stratton has not seen the pest management clauses in the new issues, and will not characterise what has changed in them until it has. Sites should work from the interpretation guide and member resources SALSA has published, which set out the changes clause by clause with the scheme's own guidance attached.

What can be said without that text is more useful anyway, because it holds regardless of what the revision says.

Take your last six pest reports. Establish three things. Whether every recommendation carries an owner and an outcome rather than a repetition. Whether activity has been recorded consistently enough that a trend could be produced from it. And whether the analysis has actually been done and written down, rather than existing as an impression held by whoever attends the site.

If any of those is missing, the gap is not closed by revising a procedure. It is closed by changing what happens on the next visit, and by the visit after that recording the same things in the same way. Sites audited in the autumn have weeks rather than months to establish that pattern.

The transition worth making

A standards revision is a reasonable moment to ask a broader question, and few sites use it that way.

The SALSA transition is one of several separate developments that have converged on the same requirement, alongside rodenticide restriction, resistance data and the narrowing of available control methods. That wider shift is set out in The Burden of Proof Has Moved (/pest-management-burden-of-proof-2026).

The requirement to analyse trends at least annually is a floor, not a specification. A programme that meets it precisely produces one retrospective analysis a year, typically assembled shortly before an audit, describing patterns that concluded some time ago. A programme that reviews activity across visits as it accumulates catches the same patterns while something can still be done about them, and produces the annual analysis as a by-product rather than a project.

Both satisfy the clause. Only one of them manages risk.

The date on the calendar is 1 September. The date that determines what your evidence looks like is whichever visit happens next.

This article provides general operational information and does not constitute legal advice. Organisations should confirm the requirements applicable to their activities, products and jurisdiction.