The FSA survey (2001) suggests that only 48% of red meat slaughterhouses and 59% of poultry meat slaughterhouses in England, Wales and Scotland claimed to have full or partial HACCP systems in place. Similar results can be found in Portugal and Greece, there was still only a minority of companies that were HACCP certified (Trienekens & Zuurbier, 2008).We further inquired some Belgian food SMEs about the results in the frame of the EU funded IMSFood project and found out that most of the companies follow ACS, IFS which is based on the HACCP principle. QA is the distinctive feature which makes the food sector different from other sectors. Companies in the food processing sector are legally bound to perform one or more QA systems, which might not be the case for other manufacturing sectors. This is an advantage for the food SMEs because at least one quality function is in place and that can be a good starting point to establish a QMS.