Leading the whey? Arla Foods Ingredients highlights safety standards behind its protein solutions

21 Mar 2019 --- Arla Foods Ingredients is seeking to highlight its quality and food safety processes, through a new campaign to demonstrate the “high standards behind its range of whey protein solutions.” To guarantee food safety at every step of the supply chain and production process, the company says it applies some of the most rigorous standards in the industry.

Because whey is a byproduct of cheese manufacture, ensuring the quality demanded by consumers and regulators is complex. Among others, the dairy company serves customers in medical and infant nutrition – categories where high quality and food safety is particularly important.

“Food safety is a top priority for our customers and a growing concern for consumers. It only takes one adverse incident to completely destroy the reputation of a brand. To meet the high standards our customers rightly expect, Arla Foods Ingredients has adopted a proactive, company-wide quality mindset. Through our new campaign, we aim to demonstrate how seriously we take our duty of care to customers and end consumers alike,” Yvette Kaster, Director for Global Quality, Environmental Health and Safety at Arla Foods Ingredients explains.

“End-users in the medical and infant nutrition categories depend highly on the quality of products. They can be very vulnerable and often it is the only food they consume during the day. They have to trust the manufacturer and therefore also suppliers like Arla Foods Ingredients,” Kaster tells FoodIngredientsFirst.

“Arla Foods Ingredients has a strong strategy in quality and food safety which defines the path for continuous improvement,” she explains. “This strategy includes a focus on establishing the foundations for a strong regulatory and innovation agenda, as well as improving the entire value chain from sourcing to product quality.”

According to Kaster, there is a strong focus on quality and food safety throughout the entire industry. “It’s caused by the need for protection of vulnerable end-users, but unfortunately also due to several scandals in the food industry in past decades,” she adds.  

“In this campaign, we are sharing our achievements in quality and food safety and showing the world that when you do business with Arla Foods Ingredients, you get raw material you can trust. You also know you will be working with people in a learning environment and a proactive quality and food safety culture,” Kaster continues. “Our customers can be confident we are a company willing to invest far beyond the expected standards because we build quality and food safety into the design of our processes and plants.”

“For the future, it is important for Arla Foods Ingredients that we continue to improve in quality and food safety and ensure we help protect end-users. This is anchored in our quality and food safety strategy,” she notes. 

The company has highlighted the measures it takes to fulfill its duty of care to its customers. Some examples of which are:

• Rigorous quality control: Numerous farm-to-factory quality checks are carried out before whey arrives at the company’s production plants and there are more checks before it leaves as a finished product. Overall, there can be as many as 280 checks.

• Cold processing: Strict upstream controls allow the company to use a cold processing technique. This preserves the nutritional and functional qualities of protein in a way that is not possible with ultra-high heat treatment processes.

• Industry-leading farm assurance programs: The company only sources whey from trusted suppliers and has farm assurance programs in place for all of them. These ensure the ethical treatment of cows, as well as the quality of milk.

• Proactive quality and food safety culture: The importance of quality and food safety is instilled in employees through intensive on-the-job training. The company is also recruiting a growing number of staff with backgrounds in pharma and biotech to add to its existing expertise and further improve quality and food safety procedures.