SMETA Audit Guide: Sedex Social Compliance
Sedex reports over 75,000 members across 180 countries, with more than 340,000 SMETA audits conducted globally. The most common non-compliance findings — working hours, wages below the legal minimum, and inadequate health and safety controls — appear consistently across the textile, electronics, and agriculture sectors. Under the UK Modern Slavery Act, brands like Marks & Spencer, Tesco, Unilever, and Primark explicitly cite SMETA audit programs in their public modern slavery statements, and the EU's CSDDD now extends similar due diligence obligations across the entire bloc. For a supplier, a lapsed or missing SMETA report increasingly means automated deselection from buyer procurement systems — often before a human reviewer ever sees the application.
SMETA (Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit) is the most widely used social compliance audit methodology in the world. It assesses working conditions across labor standards, health and safety, environmental management, and business ethics. For suppliers in apparel, textiles, electronics, furniture, and FMCG, a current SMETA audit report is often the price of admission to the Western buyer market. On the Sustalium platform, we see the same buyer who requests a CE Declaration of Conformity now routinely asking for the most recent social audit — because procurement teams are being measured on supply chain risk, not just product compliance.