Quality and safety in food from a by-product

Arla Foods Ingredients is revealing details of its quality and food safety processes. The initiative is part of a new campaign to demonstrate the ultra-high standards behind its market-leading range of whey protein solutions.

Because whey is a by-product of cheese manufacture, ensuring the quality demanded by consumers and regulators is complex. Among others, Arla Foods Ingredients serves customers in medical and infant nutrition – categories where high quality and food safety is particularly important. To guarantee food safety at every step of the supply chain and production process, the company applies some of the most rigorous standards in the industry.

Arla Foods Ingredients has embarked on a long-term strategy, ‘Safely delivering the wonders of whey’, highlighting the measures it takes to fulfil its duty of care to 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 its quality and food safety procedures

Yvette Kaster, Director for Global Quality, Environmental Health and Safetyat Arla Foods Ingredients, said: “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.”

Source: Arla Food Ingredients