Approach

Our safety, security, health and environment (SSHE) management capability is of critical importance to our operations. Safety, along with quality see food safety and quality is a non-negotiable aspect of our business, and we aim for zero harm: zero fatalities, zero workplace injuries and zero process-safety incidents.

Legal compliance is the foundation of our SSHE focus, and informs our policy and strategy, especially at our current level of maturity, where we are still focused on foundational capabilities, systems and practices. Our SSHE policy framework includes a health and safety policy, physical security policy and environment policy. The key legislation informing these policies includes the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA), Private Security Industry Regulation (PSIRA) Act, and National Environmental Management Act (NEMA) respectively.

We take a risk-based approach to SSHE management, and place a strong focus on building a culture where safety is paramount, and managers lead visibly by example. We are continuously improving our processes to detect issues early and manage risks effectively to prevent and reduce harm to our employees, visitors and contractors. Our internal and external auditing programme provides assurance on our SSHE systems, and is an essential enabler of effective risk management and performance improvements. A strong capacity programme is another key enabler of effective SSHE practice and performance, and training is a key ongoing component of our approach.

We have a five-year strategy for each sub-function within SSHE, and the collective focus is on establishing clear risk management disciplines, building critical capabilities and achieving excellence in compliance. We have key performance indicators (KPIs) at group, manufacturing and individual performance levels. We track incidents and performance monthly, and engage monthly on performance at all sites through a SSHE forum hosted in the second week of every month. Safety performance accounts for 10% of an individual’s variable performance reward under our short-term incentive (STI) remuneration scheme (see our people). We have strong support from Exco and the board for driving SSHE improvements across the business.

Management systems

Our SSHE management system is defined by our SSHE pillar within our manufacturing, excellence, customs and practices (MECP) house that defines all functional standards and practices across manufacturing, including in relation to quality (see food safety and quality). The MECP framework provides us with a roadmap for achieving manufacturing excellence, based on a system for understanding an organisation’s level of maturity against best-practice standards for manufacturing. The SSHE pillar provides further guidance and tools for systematising the day-to-day management practices at our operations, including standard operating procedures (SOPs), target setting, risk assessment and reporting. We have started implementing the SSHE pillar at all our manufacturing sites in 2022. The SSHE pillar covers the management of safety, security, health and environment-related topics.

Our SSHE pillar maturity is at a foundational level. Aligning with this level of maturity, our current focus is on building compliance-related due-diligence processes, and developing and implementing standard operating procedures that stipulate exactly how we manage our key SSHE topics, and provide a benchmark against which to audit our management and operational processes. We measure KPIs daily, weekly, and monthly, and have ordered site-level reporting processes. The data from all sites is consolidated, and we are able to measure our progress at a granular level.

In regard to environmental management, our SSHE pillar is supported by an ISO 14001 environmental management system. All our sites are certified against the ISO 14001 standard. We have systematic processes at site level for identifying and assessing environmental impacts and risks, monitoring progress and performance, and auditing our management processes for compliance with our standards. Feedback from site-level impact and risk assessments inform our risk management processes at more strategic levels in the business, with significant issues escalated where necessary. All our plants complete regular impact and risk assessments, identify what issues are scoring high, and develop an environmental improvement plan with objectives and targets to address these issues. We do annual audits on environmental management for all sites except Chococam, and these include site visits to check compliance to policies and to control or eliminate flagged issues.

A key challenge is that all our SSHE data management and reporting is currently done manually. A digital data management and reporting system would greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of our processes, and allow for deeper analysis to better inform our planning and strategy development processes. We have plans and budgets approved to build a digital data management system from 2023 onwards.

Management processes

Our SSHE strategy is endorsed by the chief manufacturing officer. We have plant managers and SSHE officers at all sites, and the group SSHE team drives compliance and performance by guiding and supporting site-level personnel with understanding compliance needs, addressing impacts and risks, and closing the gaps identified through risk assessments.

Legal compliance is championed by our own personnel at each site, as well as through the contractual agreements with service providers. Risk assessments are primarily conducted internally, with external authorities or specialists involved when specific concerns need to be addressed. Risks are prioritised on a matrix based on likelihood and significance, with resource allocation responding to this prioritisation. For some of our security needs, we do not have a clear line of sight on key impacts and risks, and so we rely on service providers for this information.

The reporting requirements we have established with service providers ensure that feedback and data get reported in to site managers and at Group level. Implementation of the management system and standards are managed through robust internal audits, and monthly progress meetings with the respective SSHE officers. The closure of gaps and process deviations are tracked via corrective action plans. The status of all priority risks are circulated to the chief manufacturing officer, who drives closure with the legally appointed representative of each manufacturing plant.

Starting in 2021, we have established monthly SSHE meetings at all sites, where we discuss key issues, trends and results. These meetings are driving key changes at site level. We have also made new hires to the SSHE team, and these new staff members have increased our capacity for monthly onsite monitoring and auditing of management procedures and performance. In 2022, we completed the development and implementation of SOPs for the SSHE pillar at all our manufacturing sites. We conducted baseline and follow-up SSHE pillar assessments at all our manufacturing facilities, except for LAF, Peanut Butter, and Chococam. Although we did not assess these sites, our pillar requirements and SOPs were still rolled out at those sites.

We also completed a SSHE “deep dive” in 2022 to mine the data we have for all our sites, and perform more in-depth analysis of our performance. This exercise provided enormous insight into our operations and SSHE performance across all key management topics, which we are using to update our strategies and plans going forward. We have started with a dedicated environmental strategy initiated this year. The “deep dive” highlighted that data availability is currently a key barrier to progressing our SSHE practice and performance.

Health and safety

Our approach is informed by the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) and related requirements, with which we fully comply to secure our operating licence. Our SSHE Pillar goes a step further than legal requirements and incorporates good practices which we have incorporated into our standards. Our key occupational health concerns include noise-induced hearing loss, respiratory impact of dust, and physical strain injuries and impacts relating the lifting of heavy loads. All these health and safety impacts are site dependent, and operate over the medium- to long-term, with the exception of sudden physical strain from the lifting of heavy loads.

We have a basic foundation in health and safety management, which enables us to monitor and measure performance, and drive continual improvement. Our integrated health and safety management processes include clear annual targets, new management systems and SOPs, strengthened operational discipline, and behavioural safety initiatives that foster a safety-oriented culture driven by visible demonstration and accountability from managers and leadership.

Our current focus is on deepening our foundational capabilities and systematising our management processes through the implementation of our SSHE pillar (see above). Implementing the SSHE pillar across all our sites will strengthen our compliance-based foundation in health and safety management, and enable us to drive progress towards excellence and world-class standards going forward. In 2022, we implemented SOPs for health and safety across all our manufacturing facilities, with the exception of third-party manufacturers and third-party logistics warehouses.

We address behavioural safety and the reduction of occupational health exposures through ongoing employee engagement, awareness-raising, and routine and specialised training, as well as through addressing any ergonomic issues in our office and production environments.

Safety Our safety management processes ensure that for every incident that occurs, a root-cause analysis process is triggered, which informs future preventive measures and enables continual improvement. We continue to apply disciplinary action where appropriate, and where incidents are a result of employee negligence. A detailed investigation is carried out for every fatality and lost-time injury, involving a multi-disciplinary team and senior management. The results are reviewed at group level to ensure that the whole company learns from the incident. In 2022, we held one-on-one sessions with those involved in all recorded injuries, to drive more focused improvement in our prevention mechanisms. A key challenge we have faced in recent years has been a decline in visible safety leadership performed by our managers, and a gap in safety knowledge and awareness between group and plant-level employees. We are remedying this through multiple channels, including awareness raising, capacity building, and leadership development see our people. We used Tiger Safety Week in May 2022 to re-activate a top-of-mind sense of importance and urgency around safety. For a full week we ran various safety awareness activations and held refresher sessions on various topics across our sites. We shared the group safety performance, which has not been good, to reiterate that safety needs to come first, and that we need to collectively take ownership of improving our performance. Later in the year, we took all frontline supervisors and selected shopfloor employees from all sites through an intensive one-day training intervention on basic safety fundamentals, and made sure that all participants passed the training, even where this required special attention and reassessments. This training proved highly necessary and vitally important for refresher safety knowledge, awareness and supervision at our sites. The training was delivered in the first language of the participants to ensure that the content was well understood. Training management is a key gap we need to address going forward, especially in regard to external contractors that work onsite. A key aim of our safety management programme is to improve our operational effectiveness by reducing our lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) through better management standards and procedures, sharper operational discipline, and stronger synergy between our standards and discipline. We improved our focus on our entire safety pyramid in manufacturing in 2022 with a very specific drive to improve the bottom of the safety pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid is made up of safety risks and observations (SROs), comprising unsafe conditions, unsafe acts and positive safety observations. We also introduced the reporting and investigation of major near misses, which are any near-misses that could have resulted in a serious injury or fatality. The process of identifying these, reporting them, and investigating them is still improving and will be a key input to prevent serious injuries and fatalities going forward. We have not performed well on safety in 2022, and we have a long way to go to improve. Regretfully, we recorded three fatalities across the business: one contractor fatality in manufacturing, one contractor fatality in logistics, and one employee who died in a road accident on route to market. We also recorded a significant increase in manufacturing incidents this year, largely driven by improved reporting of contractor lost-time injuries (LTIs) that have previously been under-reported. Our total recordable case frequency rate (TRCFR) increased from 0,46 in 2021 to 0,62 in 2022, and our lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) increased from 0,31 in 2021 to 0,45 in 2022. We recorded 128 LTIs in 2022, representing a 30% increase from 99 in 2021. While our safety figures appear to indicate a regression in our safety performance in manufacturing, our real performance is comparable to previous years. We have improved our reporting of incidents in 2022 based on the development and deployment of formal standards that govern the consistency of incident reporting. Although we differentiate between employee and contractor injuries, we report on both categories in our total injury statistics. This has become consistent in 2022, but contractor injuries were not consistently reported in previous years, hence the increase in our injury figures this year. We now have a more accurate base from which to act on and measure our real improvements going forward. We have entered into engagements with certain contractors to resolve the high number of injuries.

Health

Our core occupational health programme focuses on the delivery of health risk assessments, occupational hygiene surveys, medical surveillance, primary health care, and employee wellness support in partnership with HR see our people. Our employee wellbeing support programme offers 24-hour telephonic counselling and face-to-face counselling from professional psychologists, social workers, dieticians, bio-kineticists, and financial and legal advisers. Our onsite clinic services include occupational health support and essential primary healthcare, which is free to all permanent and temporary employees onsite. We provide an ongoing primary healthcare service to all employees, and manage the risk and incidence of infectious disease through the primary healthcare programme.

We identify our top health risks through occupational hygiene surveys and health risk assessments for different tasks within the manufacturing environment. These due-diligence processes, including any abnormal or significant health-surveillance results, are reported to top-management for inclusion in operational risk management planning, to inform ongoing health awareness campaigns and training, and to drive continual improvement in our occupational health performance. We completed ergonomic and occupational hygiene surveys in 2022.

We run a routine staff medical surveillance programme. The management of chronic diseases is a key concern, and we screen all our employees and contract labour for lifestyle diseases, including diabetes, cholesterol, HIV/Aids and hypertension. Employees who are found to have more than one of these chronic conditions are encouraged to enrol in our THRIVE employee wellness programme see our people.

Our key occupational health actions in 2022 are rolling over into the next year, and relate to our drive to establish a robust foundational system and practice in line with OHSA. Our focus has been on establishing standardised contracting processes that set our requirements for service providers, and articulate exactly what service providers are required to do through service-level agreements, with performance and compliance procedures managed at group level. We have issued a request for proposals to on-board service providers, employing the new processes, and this remains a key action going forward.

Responding to Covid-19 remains relevant to both our occupational health and wellness programmes, yet Covid-19 is no longer flagged as a key operational or strategic risk, and we are no longer proactively screening, testing and vaccinating staff. We are compliant with the new Health Act and related code of practice, have established hygiene protocols in place, and remain alert and ready to respond to any change in the current situation.

Security

The socio-economic context and high level of crime and theft in South Africa, coupled with the location of our sites and the attractiveness of our products within this context, exposes our business to numerous internal and external security risks. Ongoing wage negotiations in a sometimes tense employee-relations environment see our people can trigger strike action and disciplinary hearings, both of which hold security risks. Security is a growing concern for Tiger Brands, particularly in the aftermath of Covid-19 and the civil unrest in 2021. We had multiple sites that were impacted by the looting which took place as part of the 2021 unrest, and these sites have recovered from the impact, but our business continuity plans were well-tested.

Approach

Our approach to managing security is informed by the Private Security Industry Regulation (PSIRA) Act and Firearms Control Act, and we remain in full compliance with all relevant requirements and regulations. Ongoing collaboration with law enforcement authorities and other key industry and security stakeholders, including networking with fellow security managers from other organisations, is a key part of our approach.

We have a physical security policy and a draft strategy in place, with security procedures and guidelines developed to support the implementation of both. Our group security manager is responsible for drafting and updating the security policy and strategy. The physical security policy forms a key part of our overall security governance framework, and defines the security delivery model, structure and roles and responsibilities pertaining to security management in the organisation. The policy establishes mechanisms for the protection of physical assets, people, business processes and information against potential security threats and risks (theft, malicious attack, personal harm, violent protests, etc) by defining security risk control measures and security compliance requirements.

Our draft security strategy sets the following key objectives:

• Ensure a well-coordinated, standardised, professional and consistent security service delivery across the organisation
• Ensure security operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness
• Meet current and future organisational security needs
• Benchmark with industry best-practices
• Create and maintain a safe and secure operating environment and enhance business continuity.

We make a continuous effort to understand current and emerging security trends, including cybersecurity trends see cybersecurity, and we undertake consistent work at all our facilities to continuously improve our security controls and security management.

Management

Our management processes are held by the MECP management framework of our SSHE pillar (see above). Our security management actions at site level are guided by quarterly risk assessments through which we identify and prioritise significant security risks, and formulate mitigating action plans. We have subscribed to Marsh security design standards which align to industry best-practices, and Marsh South Africa conducts security risk control audits at our manufacturing sites and warehouses, as part of our combined assurance process see management. We have drafted our own internal site security design standard, which is still to be implemented.

Our review of the civil unrest in 2021 and the impact of this on our sites and operations has informed improvements to our security management system and processes. Since these events, we have brought additional service providers on board, and initiated a process to build the capacity of our service providers to better enable a swift response to immediate or sudden threats. We are currently designing a comprehensive security awareness training programme for all employees, so that we can establish a foundational level of security awareness and alertness across the business. The group security manager in collaboration with site-level SSHE officers, drive the implementation of our security design standards, and ensure compliance.

Group security has service level agreements in place with contracted security service providers that define service levels and performance standards. All sites are required to meet with the operational management of the security service providers to evaluate operational performance against agreed targets. We have security contract managers who assist us on a daily basis to drive performance, evaluate progress, and support with compliance. This year, we established a group security steering committee that includes business managers, plant managers and key directors. The steering committee meets quarterly, engaging on risk management programmes and initiatives, and the building of security management capacity. In addition to the monthly SSHE forums which are held virtually for all SSHE resources at site level, we also hold a separate monthly security forum with site-level personnel and service providers. This dedicated security forum is a key channel for all security personnel to stay on the pulse of issues, create awareness on key developments and discuss improvements. Monthly team and one-on-one performance evaluation meetings are held to track team and individual progress.

Performance

We have performed well in 2022. The implementation of our strategy, management system and SOPs are in place with more coverage and detail than we have had before, and are being clearly rolled out across our sites, with training and awareness ongoing. We have ensured that site-level risk assessments are completed every quarter, and have improved our security reporting processes. We have drafted site security plans, and are working to iron-out inconsistencies and standardise these plans, including access controls and procedures, across all sites.

Our key security risks currently include internal theft of products, which can be difficult to detect, and route-to-market hijackings and armed-robberies in the Albany business. We are managing our most common security risks reasonably effectively – including petty crime, theft and strike-related risks – yet they remain an ongoing challenge that reveals new circumstances at each incident. We have physical security measures in place at our manufacturing sites and distribution centres, including perimeter fencing, security officers, CCTV cameras, access control systems and intruder alarm systems.

Route-to-market (RTM) incidents in the Albany business remains our biggest security challenge and the most significant risk to our business. Reducing these safety and security incidents is a top priority. We continue to implement preventive measures, including continuous risk assessment, the provision of armed security vehicle escorts on high-risk routes, and various site-level measures, yet the risk remains very high and difficult to address, due to the unpredictable nature of the external environment and the sophistication of criminal threats. We continue to analyse incidents and are working on new and alternative response measures.

We recorded a total of 123 security incidents in 2022, with 91 RTM incidents and 32 site incidents. Of the 32 reported site incidents, 20 were minor incidents. Over the last seven years, we have recorded 663 Albany route-to-market incidents, ranging from petty theft to major robbery/hijacking and violence. After an increasing trend in incidents was observed over three years from 2019 to 2021, we have a slight decrease in incidents this year. In 2022, we recorded 91 route-to-market security incidents (2021: 105), fortunately with zero loss of life, yet with 68% of the lost-time injuries in Bakeries being RTM related (2021: 83%). Losses of cash, bread and crates relating to these RTM incidents amounted to a total financial loss of R446 000 in 2022, compared to R748 000 in 2021.

Environment

Our most material environmental concerns relate to direct and indirect impacts from water and energy consumption, food processing and manufacturing, the operation of boilers, cleaning our facilities and vehicles and packaging and transporting products. Our key environmental focus areas are energy and climate change, water and effluents, food waste and loss and plastic packaging waste. Landscape transformation and the loss of biodiversity from agricultural activities upstream in our supply chain is an issue we consider and address through our ethical sourcing practices see ethical supply chain.

Approach

Legislative compliance, as well as the imperative to drive resource and cost-efficiencies through the business, are key factors in prioritising our environmental activities. In South Africa, the security of both energy and water are a concern, with energy security currently a more pressing issue, with rolling blackouts (loadshedding) a regular occurrence. There are a number of environmental legislative instruments of relevance to our business across all our environmental focus areas see environmental stewardship. New legislative developments in South Africa include the forthcoming Climate Change Act, a planned carbon tax increase, and new extended producer regulations (EPR) for the management of post-consumer waste. We are currently developing a web-based legal register to help us get ahead of these legislative developments and keep our environmental compliance on track

We have an environmental policy and a waste management policy, both of which were updated this year, and with both updates pending approval. We are in the process of developing an updated environmental strategy for approval in 2023. Environmental awareness and training is a key part of our approach to drive continual improvement, yet the management of training is a key area that requires attention if it is to effectively support the improvement of our practice and performance going forward. The environmental training of new employees is currently precursory, with only basic environmental training at site level. We did hold monthly water and energy days at every site this year to create awareness and fast-track the identification and fixing of leaks and other maintenance-related inefficiencies.

Over the last few years, we have improved our environmental governance and legislative adherence through key industry partnerships, and continue to invest in reducing our environmental footprint in accordance with the environmental stewardship pillar of our sustainability strategy see environmental stewardship From a more strategic risk perspective, we have taken initial steps to differentiate compliance-related environmental impact and risk management processes from more strategic sustainability-related risk management. We have flagged climate change (linked to water security) as its own category of environmental risk, and include this in the group risk register as an emerging strategic risk, but have not formally ranked the risk or unpacked it in detail see management.

Management

Environmental management falls under our SSHE capability, and is managed through the SSHE team. All our sites are ISO14001 certified, and we have taken this a step further with our SSHE pillar (see above) which covers our key environmental topics. The improvements we have made in regard to these management systems transfers to an improvement in our environmental management capability. In accordance with these management systems, we have foundational impact and risk assessment processes in place at operational level. We identify what issues are scoring high, and develop an environmental improvement plan with objectives and targets for each site. The Group SSHE team does site visits to check compliance to our policies and SOP’s, and monitor progress against the key issues flagged.

A key activity completed in 2022 was the ‘deep dive’ into our SSHE performance, which included a strong focus on our core environmental topics and performance indicators. This research uncovered a lot of information about the environmental performance of our operations, which is proving highly useful in our efforts to enhance our environmental compliance and develop an environmental strategy. Through this exercise, we have better defined our environmental KPIs and exactly how they should be measured and reported. We identified key weaknesses in our management of waste and effluent, and have initiated projects to improve our performance and compliance in these areas. A key success was effectively reducing effluent-related risk across almost all our sites, yet we still face challenges regarding authorisation for a number of our boreholes.

From a due diligence perspective, we continue to conduct root-cause analysis on significant environmental incidents, and ensure that corrective and preventive measures are implemented. We have increased the frequency of our on-site monitoring and improved our internal reporting processes, and this has improved our recording and management of environmental incidents. The reporting of minor incidents and environmental risks and observations remain a challenge across the group, however, the regular SSHE meetings established this year offer a platform to address this issue.

For more information on our environmental performance see environmental stewardship.