Safe and reliable products

Our commitment

As a food manufacturer, we have a natural responsibility for ensuring that our products are safe and meet our specifications. Our primary concern is consumer health and safety and trust in our products. For quality, resource efficiency and trust are also key to our customers. If, for instance, our industrial products are not completely up to par, customers’ production suffers. This is why product safety and quality are not only a question of living op to our responsibility - both aspects are essential for running a sound business.  

Our actions

We will supply safe products and continue developing our effective HACCP system - an internationally recognised and widely used method for setting up an efficient product safety management system. We also aim to communicate relevant experience through the value chain and share best practice and knowledge, internally and externally.

 

Team of experts
We have a corporate team of highly qualified food safety experts. Their task is to  constantly identify, evaluate and, jointly with our plants, prevent any potential risk in our production chain. Risk analyses comprise biological, physical, chemical and allergenic hazards. 

 

Safe food handling
As a visible proof of our high product safety standards, we were in 2005 the first company in the world to be certified to ISO 22000, a standard for food and feed safety management, and the first international ISO standard focusing on product safety. Today, all our plants are certified to ISO 22000. In 2009 we were also certified to PAS 220, which is a specification with additional prerequisite programs to ensure food safety. Because we already have ISO 22000 we now comply with the FSSC 22000, which globally is recognized as a corresponding standard to BRC and IFS. We are also certified to the ISO 9001 quality standard.

 

Control of chemical pollution
Our products meet applicable EU directives and national legislation for food products in terms of undesirable substances like heavy metals, pesticides and toxins, all of which we monitor based on a comprehensive analysis programme. 

 

No genetically modified raw materials
Genetic modification is a complex area, which we follow closely. Outside the EU, growers are increasingly cultivating genetically modified sugar beet, and growing of genetically modified sugar cane are in the pipeline. Sometime in the future, genetically modified raw materials may prove completely unproblematic. However, we have chosen not to use raw materials involving genetic engineering.

 

We have signed individual agreements with all our beet suppliers, to the effect that they use only sugar beet seeds purchased by us. And our seed suppliers have guaranteed that all seeds delivered to us are developed according to conventional methods. Our suppliers of cane sugar and other ingredients are subject to the same requirement of supplying GMO-free material only.

 

Traceability
Even though we are industry leaders in product safety, we cannot guarantee 100% that errors will not arise. In such rare cases, we must be able to trace the error back to its origin - be it at our own plant or with a supplier. We have a product tracing system that enables us to trace a product all the way to the customer. It enables us to react rapidly and recall the product in case of mistakes.

 

Quality culture
Product safety is not achieved merely by adopting policies and obtaining certificates. Our commitment is supported by a culture among our employees of focusing on quality in all steps of the production. To continually develop this culture internal training and information are an integral element of our product safety activities. We encourage a culture that does not hide our errors. On the contrary, we discuss them and learn from them. We also regularly organise “mock recalls” – i.e. training exercises in which our employees are tasked with handling fictitious product recalls.

Our performance

The number of customer complaints increased by 5% from 2007 to 2008 – primarily in Denmark, Sweden and a few other markets. However, no complaint was serious, i.e. they did not relate to food safety hazards. One explanation for the increase in complaints is that we now record complaints even more systematically – particularly complaints related to logistics. Actually, the increase in complaints reflects an in-house improvement. We have reorganised complaints handling, which has resulted in enhanced efficiency and shortened turnaround time.

In all complaint cases, customers receive our first feedback within 24 hours, against previously 60%. Additionally, we are able to consider almost all complaints within two weeks and give customers the final feedback.