Bidfood Ingredients is committed to providing food ingredients to the bakery, poultry, meat, and general food industries. Priorities include maintaining the highest standards of food quality and safety, providing a safe working environment and offering training and development opportunities for staff.

We formally address climate change in our working environment, as part of a global initiative, in order to reduce global emissions and in so doing sustain the environment and our business in the future. Crop failures resulting from climate change could have a major impact on the supply of raw materials to our factories from both local and international sources. Contingency planning in this regard is an important consideration.

Conventional energy costs are increasing, impacting on consumer affordability of our products. The objective is to reduce the consumption of electricity and other fuels through planned initiatives throughout our operations.  Other material contributors which have impact on sustainability, such as water consumption, waste and effluent reduction, are also being addressed. 

Material sustainable development issues

• management of credit risk
• food safety and product integrity
• reducing energy, waste and impact on the environment
• employee engagement
• the skills development of staff
• broad-based black economic empowerment through employment equity and procurement

Labour practices and decent work

Employee engagement

Around 74% of the workforce have strong collective representation through the Food and Allied Workers Union and engage at HR director level with the company in a strong relationship where issues are generally worked out constructively. A participative management style contributes to team spirit and morale. Further engagement takes place through our employment equity committees at each of our 18 business unit sites. In this decentralised process, issues on the ground can be dealt with on site rather than watered down or lost through centralised filtering. Committees meet quarterly, minutes are taken and agenda items followed up and reported back to all stakeholders concerned.

Skills and enterprise development

Skills shortages, especially in specialised areas such as food technology, remain acute. We address this shortage by attracting talented specialists, creating an amenable work environment and ongoing training. Our investment in skills development rose to R3.216 million, for an average of R2 477 per employee (2009: R2 112 per employee). We continue to subsidise the Centre for Culinary Excellence at Johannesburg University. With enterprise development also in mind, three aspirant chefs are being trained in order to improve the quality of the food preparation at our onsite canteen, which they run as a business. 

Aside from specific skill-sets, there is a great need for adult basic education and training at shop-floor level, as well as general management skills at supervisor and middle management level. We have improved our response with a strong career and succession planning element, beginning with aptitude tests for each potential candidate. A range of programmes have been run, focusing on Bidvest’s First for Service philosophy, as well as dealing with waste in all its forms – time, resources, processes, materials and costs. This year, we also ran supervisor training across the Group. We are continuing with the learnership programme in partnership with the Food and Beverage and Wholesale and Retail SETAs. 

Health and safety

A full-time nurse has been hired to manage health issues on site and a wellness day is being held in September, 2010. Critical aspects of health and safety management, such as audits, are outsourced to specialist consultants in the field. Spot checks are also conducted and a full incident report serves as a guide for improving systems and closing loopholes.

HIV/Aids

HIV/Aids awareness and prevalence testing programme conducted in the workforce last year revealed a prevalence rate of 18%, about average for the industry. Following up on this, Bidfood Ingredients has sponsored private counselling on a confidential basis and will continue to offer assistance as appropriate to the circumstances.

Economic performance - BEE

We anticipate that we will improve our BEE score for the DTI’s CoGP from a level 5 to level 4 contributor by focussing on employment equity, skills development, socio-economic development and preferential procurement. Local teams are responsible for their own BEE targets and progress is tracked.

In addition to the enterprise development described earlier, the bakery business has empowered a few ex-warehouse employees as representatives in the informal market.

Product responsibility

Food safety

Considering that reputational risk is often linked to food safety, Bidfood Ingredients adheres to strict food safety standards. We have invested in our own food safety department headed up by a doctor of food science and invested in analytical equipment to understand products and their ingredients in more detail. Through this attention to the latest best practices, Bidfood Ingredients is establishing a reputation that offers us a competitive advantage. We work closely with our customers, and their audits of our products and operations continues to improve. Our positioning as quality suppliers is supported by our status as distributors and technology partners of trusted overseas brands such as Cargill, BK Guilini, Vemag and AB Mauri.

While we comply with HACCP, we have also been working towards ISO 22000 (regarded as the most stringent worldwide) and achieved this standard at our Cape Town savoury ingredients factory. Food safety processes and quality standards have been established, awareness sessions have been held at all our trading branches, and we have employed a second training resource to assist with the roll-out of our food safety programme at these branches.

Legislative risk is closely monitored. We see a continuing trend toward stringent regulation of food safety. Major items of legislation such as the Consumer Protection Act (scheduled for imminent implementation) also have wide-ranging ramifications. We liaise proactively with the Consumer Goods Council in this regard whose role is to feed back industry opinion to the DTI.

Developments such as this impose an implicit requirement that a major supplier like Bidfood Ingredients invest continually in new technology, rigorous quality controls and staff training. For us, such investment is standard practice. We therefore see this ‘risk’ as an opportunity to differentiate ourselves from competitors that are less well resourced.

Energy and the environment

Reducing our carbon footprint goes hand in hand with finding efficiencies in all our processes. A process of target-setting, quarterly monitoring and regular reviews is in the process of being instituted. One initiative is a new warehouse management system implemented at the savoury ingredients factory. The objective is to streamline manufacturing processes while improving our inventory management. The system also ensures product traceability, which further supports the quality of our service. While the system is currently in pilot phase, the plan is to roll this out at further branches.

We have gained further efficiencies in the logistics chain, put our drivers through training to improve driving habits, and added tracking technology to the whole Chipkins Bakery Supplies fleet to monitor performance.  We now also measure electricity, water, fuel and waste streams, setting targets for each site and reporting quarterly.

Our Durban yeast factory remains a challenge, being an old and environmentally inefficient facility. We continuously engage the council and made the required changes to renew our annual effluent permit.

Human rights

Human rights issues such as freedom of association, child labour and forced or compulsory labour, are enshrined under South Africa’s constitution and well legislated for under various relevant Acts. Incidents of discrimination are monitored in accordance with legislation and there were no significant incidents to report.

Screening of suppliers and contractors outside of South Africa is largely covered by the quality of our business associations and Bidfood Ingredients deals largely with well-known brands.

Society

Crime

We recognise the importance of anti-competitive legislation and have contracted an independent consultancy to conduct training sessions on anticompetitive behaviour and the issue has become an agenda item at every meeting. Each employee has filled in a ‘disclosure of interest’ form.