Certification and the FSI Basket: what European buyers require, and the Kenyan standard that covers all three scopes

The framework most origin-side content misses

Buyers rarely ask "are you certified?" and leave it there. Large European buyers source against the FSI Basket of Standards, maintained by the Floriculture Sustainability Initiative.

FSI does not issue a certificate of its own. It maintains a list of accepted schemes, benchmarked by independent third parties, and buyers commit to sourcing a proportion of volume certified against schemes in the basket. There are sixteen schemes in it.

The basket has three scopes, and they are benchmarked by three different bodies:

Source: FSI 2030, Basket of Standards, read 25 September 2026.

A supplier needs cover in each scope a buyer asks for. That is why farms routinely hold several certificates at once — and why the composition of these lists has real commercial consequences. What you can verify about a supplier before you commit →

The three lists, as published

Three of the schemes on these lists now have pages of their own: the Kenya Flower Council standard, GLOBALG.A.P. for flowers and ornamentals and MPS.

GAP scope

EHPEA Code of Practice · EU Organic Farming · Florverde Sustainable Flowers Standard · FloriCompact · Global G.A.P. Floriculture Standard · Kenya Flower Council Silver Standard · MPS-Compact · MPS-GAP · OHAS Grower Standard · USDA National Organic Program

Alongside GLOBALG.A.P. IFA for floriculture, the IFA Plant Propagation Material and IFA Fruits & Vegetables standards are also accepted.

Environmental scope

FloriCompact · Florverde Sustainable Flowers Standard · Global G.A.P. IDA Module/Add-on · Kenya Flower Council Silver Standard · MPS-ABC · MPS-Compact · MPS-GAP · MPS-SQ · SIZA Environmental Standard

Social scope

Amfori Code of Conduct · EHPEA Code of Practice · ETI Base Code / SMETA · FairTrade Hired Labour Standard · Florverde Sustainable Flowers Standard · Kenya Flower Council Silver Standard · MPS-SQ · Rainforest Alliance Certificate · SIZA Social Standard · SA8000 Standard

The observation worth the whole page

Read the three lists against each other and only two schemes appear in all of them: the Kenya Flower Council Silver Standard, and Florverde Sustainable Flowers Standard.

Florverde is Colombian. The other is Kenyan.

What follows commercially. A Kenyan grower certified to the Kenya Flower Council Silver Standard has cover in all three FSI scopes from a single Kenyan certification, without separately buying a European scheme. Most schemes in the basket cover one scope or two.

This is a specific, checkable advantage of Kenyan origin, and it is close to absent from English-language content about Kenyan flowers — which tends to reach for scenery and superlatives when it could reach for this.

Derivation, so you can check it. The table is read off the three published lists above and nothing else. If FSI changes a list, the conclusion changes with it. That is why the date is on this page.

A live caveat on Ethiopia and Fairtrade — and a question we cannot answer

The Social list carries a footnote:

"EHPEA & Fairtrade have been placed under Temporary Admission Status to allow completion of the SSCI benchmarking process with a final deadline of 1 July 2026."

That deadline has passed. The note was still published on 25 September 2026 — the page's own metadata gives its last modification as 10 June 2026, before the deadline — and the outcome is not stated on the page. We do not know whether the benchmarking completed, whether temporary admission was extended, or whether anything changed.

We are not going to guess, and nor should you. If your programme depends on Fairtrade social cover, or on an Ethiopian supplier certified to EHPEA, that is a question to put to FSI or to the scheme owner directly before you commit. It is exactly the kind of detail that is invisible until it blocks a qualification.

The Kenyan national standard — an open regulatory question

KS 1758 Part 1 is Kenya's horticulture industry code of practice for floriculture, issued under the Kenyan standards and agriculture authorities. Its scope is unusually broad: it reaches across the value chain to breeders, propagators and producers, and also to consolidators, traders, shippers and cargo handlers.

Whether it is mandatory is disputed in the sources available to us. Certification bodies present it as a mandatory sector standard; Kenyan agricultural press has published the opposite. This site does not state which it is.

The honest formulation is the one we use: KS 1758 Part 1 is Kenya's horticulture industry code of practice for floriculture, and its application to different actors in the chain should be confirmed with the Agriculture and Food Authority or the Kenya Bureau of Standards. A regulatory status is not something to settle from a blog.

And there is a practical obstacle to confirming it, which is worth knowing before you try. The Authority's Horticultural Crops Directorate publishes a "Read KS 1758 code" link and an implementation-guide link, and both point to a subdomain that does not resolve — ks1758.afa.go.ke returns a non-existent-domain error, checked two ways on 25 September 2026, while afa.go.ke itself is live. So the official portal for this standard is currently unreachable from the Authority's own site. If you need the status settled, approach the directorate directly rather than relying on the published link.

What to ask a supplier

• Which scheme, at which level, and what is the certificate number? A scheme name without a certificate is not evidence.
• Which FSI scopes does it cover — one, two or all three — and does that match what your buyer requires?
• What is the expiry date, and who is the certification body? Certificates lapse, and the audit body matters.
• If the requirement is social cover specifically, confirm the scheme's current basket status rather than assuming last year's list still holds.

And the same standard applies to us. No certification is claimed for Kenya Flower Merchant on this page or anywhere else on this site; who we are, and what we do and do not claim, is stated on the About page →.