Insights · 5 min read
What a certification body's advertising can tell you — and what it cannot
From August 2026 our marketing covers seven things: ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 22000, ISO 50001, ISO 22301, and Kosher certification.
Published by CAS — Conformity Assessment Services · 4 September 2026
From August 2026 our marketing covers seven things: ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001, ISO 22000, ISO 50001, ISO 22301, and Kosher certification.
We operate more schemes than seven. Both statements are true, and neither is hidden.
This article is about the gap between them, and about the reading error that gap invites — because the error is not really about us.
This article will not list the schemes it is about
Not because there is anything to withhold. They are published in full, under their proper names, in the service catalogue on this website.
It is because a marketing article is the wrong place to learn a certification body's scheme list. If you want the list, do not take it from us in an advert. Take it from the catalogue, where it is complete.
That is the whole argument, and the rest of this page is why.
Advertising is a selection, not an inventory
An advert is assembled by the seller, for the seller's purpose, at a length the seller chose. Completeness is not a property it has, and no amount of care makes it one.
This is not a criticism of advertising, and it is not a licence for it either. §8.1.3 of ISO/IEC 17021-1 is explicit that information a certification body provides to any client or to the marketplace, including advertising, shall be accurate and not misleading. A selection has to be accurate about what it does say.
What it cannot be is complete. A campaign page has a theme; a carousel has six slides; a post has a first line that decides whether anything after it is read. Every one of those is a selection, and a selection cannot answer a question about a whole.
So when you read a scheme list off any seller's marketing, you are asking a document a question it was never built to answer. It will give you an answer anyway. That is the problem.
What an absence actually means
Suppose a scheme you need is not mentioned anywhere in a certification body's marketing. At least four things could be true.
The body does not operate it at all.
The body operates it, without accreditation for it.
The body operates it and is accredited for it, but it did not fit the campaign.
The body operates it, is accredited for it, and mentions it somewhere you did not look.
Four causes, one appearance. You cannot tell them apart from the outside, and the difference between the first two matters enormously to you.
The reverse also holds. Presence in an advert tells you the seller chose to mention it. On its own, it tells you nothing about accreditation.
The two documents that are obliged to be complete
Two documents answer what marketing cannot, and they answer different halves of the question.
The service catalogue lists every scheme the body operates, accredited or not. Under ISO/IEC 17021-1 §8.1.1 c), a certification body shall make public, without request, the types of management systems and certification schemes in which it operates. The catalogue is where that obligation lands.
The accreditation schedule lists only what an accreditation body assessed and granted. Ours is schedule 012418B, attached to accreditation certificate 012418A, valid to 27 November 2029.
Their failure modes are opposite, and that is the useful part. The catalogue is complete but written by the body itself, so nobody outside has checked that nothing is missing. The schedule is written by a third party and checked, but it is silent about every activity outside it — and silence there is not disapproval, it is simply absence of scope.
Neither document answers the question alone. The answer you want is where the two overlap.
Our own list makes the point against us
Of the seven things we advertise, one is not accredited.
Kosher certification is available through CAS as exclusive regional partner, with certificates issued by our partner certification body, and it sits outside the EGAC accredited scope. It carries no accreditation mark, because it has none to carry.
So even a body that has deliberately narrowed its advertising to its accredited scope does not have an advertising list identical to its accredited list. Advertised and accredited are two different memberships, and reading one off the other fails on our own page, in public, in the paragraph you are reading.
What this rule buys you: nothing you can check
It would be easy to end here by suggesting the rule makes our certificate worth more. It does not, and the claim would not survive examination.
Nothing required this. A certification body that advertises its full lawful range with accurate labelling is entirely compliant, and there is no finding to be written against it. We could drop this rule tomorrow without breaching anything.
And you cannot confirm we kept the promise by reading our adverts. That is the one place it cannot be tested. The checking you have to do is identical for us and for anyone else.
Which is why the useful thing here is not our motive. It is the method.
One question
Ask any certification body one question: which of these schemes is covered by your accreditation, and by which accreditation body?
It has a checkable answer, it works on us as well as on anyone, and it converts an advert into something you can check rather than something you have to believe.