How to get TASCC certified
A mill or co-op has told you that you need TASCC before they'll give you the work. Here's who runs the scheme, how you apply, what the first audit actually checks, and what it costs you in time.
Who runs it
TASCC — the Trade Assurance Scheme for Combinable Crops — is owned and managed by the Agricultural Industries Confederation (AIC). It is certified by Kiwa Agri Food on AIC's behalf, to ISO 17065, which means the certification body is itself independently assessed each year.
The scheme is a Scheme Manual plus four codes of practice — Storage, Haulage, Merchants and Testing Facilities. As a haulier you are working to the Code of Practice for Road Haulage. It covers the transport of bulk combinable crops, dry feed materials and ingredients, compound animal feed, and as-grown cereal and herbage seed.
It is a UK scheme, and Irish hauliers are certified under it the same way. If your customers are Irish mills and co-ops, most of them will ask for it.
Before you apply: two things that can stop you
The Haulage Exclusion List
The AIC publishes a list of materials that must never be carried on a TASCC vehicle. A lorry or trailer that has carried anything on that list is excluded from the scheme permanently — not until it's cleaned, but at any time after.
That matters most if you buy second-hand. A new haulage applicant has to be able to show evidence of the previous use of any second-hand trailer they want to run in the scheme. If you can't account for where a trailer has been, it may not be usable for TASCC work. Check that before you buy, not after.
Your drivers
The audit tests whether drivers understand contamination risk and the cleaning rules — the auditor asks them, rather than taking a signed register at face value. Kiwa run a TASCC Driver CPC course built around the road haulage standard; it counts toward Driver CPC hours and the certificate can be shown at audit. Not the only way to evidence training, but the tidiest one.
Applying
The application goes to Kiwa Agri Food. Request a TASCC joining pack, or download the application form from the AIC's scheme membership page.
The form covers your legal entity, your operating centre, the vehicles you want in scope, and the crop and feed types you'll carry. Be accurate about the vehicle list — the vehicles in scope are the ones that get inspected, and they're the ones you can legitimately put on TASCC work.
The first audit
Kiwa schedules an initial audit at your operating centre. Expect the auditor to work through four things:
- Your records. Cleaning records, previous-load declarations, pre-load inspections, delivery paperwork. Per trailer, not per driver or per month.
- Your vehicles. Physically inspected — clean, dry, sound, no residue.
- Your drivers. Questioned directly on contamination risk and the cleaning rules.
- Your procedures. A written cleaning method for each body type you run, and evidence people have read it.
Certification is then reviewed on an ongoing cycle, typically an annual audit to validate the certificate, with additional visits scheduled by the certification body.
Your certificate is public and it gets checked. The TASCC register on the AIC website is checked before work is instructed and often again at the receiving site. An out-of-date certificate is a common reason for a load to be refused or quarantined at the gate — so the renewal date matters as much as the original audit.
What to have ready before the auditor arrives
- A written cleaning method for every body type you run — tipper, bulker, walking floor.
- Drivers' signatures showing they have read it, and training evidence.
- Previous-load declarations for recent collections.
- Dated cleaning records, signed by whoever did the work, per trailer.
- Pre-load inspection records.
- Delivery paperwork that ties each load to a vehicle and a driver.
- For any second-hand trailer, evidence of what it carried before you bought it.
The single most useful habit is to keep everything against the trailer. The auditor thinks in trailers. If you can produce one trailer's full story — loads, cleanings, inspections — for any date range, most of the audit answers itself.
How long it takes, honestly
The application and the audit are the easy part. What takes time is getting the record-keeping into a state where it holds up, and then keeping it there between audits. Most hauliers who struggle aren't running dirty trailers — they're running a system that depends on somebody remembering to fill in a book.
The AIC's own figures give a sense of the volume: 524 non-conformances across 600 TASCC audits in the second quarter of 2026, categorised into major and minor.
If you're at the start of this, read what to expect at a TASCC audit next — it covers what the auditor checks and what catches people out.
TASCC records, done at the trailer.
Previous loads, cleaning records with photos, pre-load inspections and an audit-year dashboard that exports to PDF. Captured on the driver's phone as the load happens, kept per trailer. In daily use with hauliers working for Irish mills and co-ops.
See Overhaul TASCCOverhaul is not a TASCC consultant and does not carry out audits. This is general information for hauliers; check current requirements with the AIC or Kiwa Agri Food.