Millions of people rely on Tiger Brands products for their daily nutritional and health needs, including through our home and personal care products. Product safety (including food safety) and quality is a non-negotiable foundational aspect of our business, and a core organisational value. On the back of the listeriosis outbreak in 2018, we have made significant strides at strengthening our food safety and quality systems and processes, advancing our contribution to enhancing food safety in South Africa, and improving our food safety and quality performance.

Approach

Since 2019, Tiger Brands has been a member of the European Hygienic Engineering and Design Group (EHEDG), and pays an annual corporate subscription fee. EHEDG is a global consortium of food industry organisations, including Nestlé and Unilever, who come together to formulate, review and update guidelines on hygienic design and food safety and quality. These guidelines are very detailed and provide helpful guidance and expertise that informs Tiger Brands’ approach to enhance food quality and safety.

We align and comply with all relevant food-safety related legislation and regulations to retain the government certificates of acceptability for all our manufacturing factories. We have an established foundation in quality and product safety management that is aligned to applicable legislation and regulations. Our manufacturing factories undergo external certification and surveillance audits annually by a global certification body. We validate the effectiveness of our product safety and quality management systems through internal and independent third-party certification audits, and we address any identified non-conformances and share lessons learnt to further improve our processes.

Management

Our food quality management system includes a manufacturing, excellence, customs and practices (MECP) management framework, which we are currently establishing across 10 priority sites. We have started implementing the MECP framework by establishing foundational pillars of MECP practice, one of which is quality (see ethical supply chain). All our manufacturing units are certified to the Global Food Safety System Certification 22000 (FSSC 22000) standard, which is recognised by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI). This excludes three manufacturing units which are currently on Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) certification and will progress to FSSC 22000 certification by mid-2023. Additionally, all our factories conduct GFSI self-assessments on a quarterly basis. As part of our certification requirements and commitment to consumers, we conduct internal audits and risk assessments on an ongoing basis at all our manufacturing facilities, and identify specific opportunities to mitigate or eliminate the risks identified. The internal audits and risk assessments cover elements related to products, processes, equipment and infrastructure.

Our centralised food safety and quality system, embedded at group level, provides the policy, strategy, direction and support needed to empower each employee to take personal responsibility for food safety and quality, particularly at the operations level. The chief manufacturing officer is responsible for executing the food safety and quality system, with support from the quality director. The board exercises ultimate oversight on food safety and quality through the risk and sustainability committee.

Our quality strategy outlines short, medium and long-term priorities that drive improvements in our end-to-end management of food safety and quality, across functions. We aim towards a fully integrated system, where robust and contemporary processes, continuously updated, are supported by talented and well-trained people who work with inspiration in a culture of quality excellence. In line with our strategy, we set annual measurable product safety and quality objectives for all our operations, and at group level, to ensure continuous improvement and compliance with all standards. We track performance against these targets using a quality scorecard, which we have standardised across all our sites and categories, with a monthly reporting cycle on performance.

We hold ourselves, our suppliers, and third-party manufacturing partners to the same stringent standards by implementing ongoing risk assessment, gap closures and certification. In 2022, we strengthened our supplier quality assurance (SQA) programme, including our risk assessment process, across raw materials, packaging, manufacturing, hygienic design, cleaning and sanitation, finished product, monitoring and validation. Our updated approach involves multidisciplinary internal teams, which include external expert consultants, who meet weekly or bi-weekly to discuss and implement gap closure, identify capex-related issues and implementation plans to close gaps. A project management officer manages the governance of implementation plans and monitors implementation. All suppliers are required to have food safety certification, preferably a certification recognised by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), such as FSSC 22000, British Retail Consortium (BRC) Global Standards, International Featured Standard (IFS) and Safe Quality Food (SQF) Programme. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) certification is also conditionally accepted as a minimum.

The regular training of staff is a key part of our approach to ensuring effective food safety and quality management. We conduct routine food quality and safety training via our e-learning platform and onsite at all our manufacturing plants. Additional more targeted training for quality and non-quality functions is conducted as needed. We have rolled out an online tool for conducting skills assessments of the quality functions to support our identification of specific technical and behavioural training needs. Key training in 2022, included practical training in advanced hygienic engineering, FSSC 22000 train-the-trainer development, and Lean Six Sigma training as part of a project to improve bread quality. We again held a series of food safety lectures for our technical teams, delivered by Professor Gouws from the Centre for Food Safety at Stellenbosch University see below.

Performance

While we improved our performance in 2022 in certain areas of food safety and quality, we have also posted negative results in some areas. We achieved a 14% reduction in overall complaints (per million units sold), 23% reduction in the number of health-related complaints, and reduced insect complaints by 26%. Meanwhile, our negative results included one public recall, an increase of 11% on marketplace incidents, and an increase of 17% on foreign object complaints.