Wellington
How does an organisation from the bottom of the world, excell internationally in verifying andstamping its approval on food quality and safety?
The first answer is because New Zealand exports over 90% of the food it produces, and othercountries demand assurances of quality and safety against their market access standards.
The second is through 120 years of experience backed by expertise, professionalism and integritywhich sees AsureQuality as its home country’s premier food assurances provider. These attributesalso see it with significant operations in Australia, Singapore, China and the Middle East.
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AsureQuality's Dr Harry Enckevort in the SOE's sophisticatedWellington laboratory[/caption]
AsureQuality’s 1700 people have inherited and continue to develop world-leading inspection,auditing, certification, testing, training, advisory and authentication services.
As a recognised
Its Chief Science Officer, Dr Harry van Enckevort says food is the State Owned Enterprise’smain focus - giving consumers confidence in what they eat while also protecting the brands ofcountries and companies.
As well as New Zealand clients, customers include very well known non-NZ multinationals, withsome of these brands also in the very sensitive infant formula space.
“AsureQuality also has a key role in New Zealand’s food safety regulatoryframework and to do that we have to walk the line between customers and regulators. To achieve it wecan’t have conflicts of interest.”
“We can only do that because we carefully cultivate our expertise, professionalism andintegrity.”
Harry says the organisation is based on a deeply skilled people resource underpinned by itsscience and technical capabilities.
“We also have a worldwide overview – helping take exports out of New Zealand and bringingglobal perspectives back home,” he says. “That customer focus is a two-way flow; they lead usand we lead them. If we didn’t there is no way we’d have our global expertise in food qualityand safety.”
He says the company instills continual improvement through looking at ourselves and customerfeedback and surveys.
“We’re constantly looking at what we need to do to stay relevant and ahead of the game andcompetition,” Harry says. “We’re always looking to find a better way, challenging our peoplehow we can do things better, faster and smarter while still maintaining the quality of our output.Because there’s always changes in customers and industry as well as customer needs, we havefeedback loops and responses.”
A particular point of focus is to add value for a customer beyond mere compliance, not simplyticking a box as part of an audit or certification.
When we give customer feedback in an audit, they might ask what the options are to mitigate theissues,
“We say, here are some options - we don’t tell them what to do - they need to make their owncall,” he says.
For AsureQuality to still be thriving in five years time, “to still have relevance, we willhave to be commercially successful.”
“Our market offering will have to continue to be relevant, and we’ll need to maintain ourcomparative advantage against our competitors. If we do that we’d like to think we’ll have alarger global presence than we presently do. To achieve that we’ll need to continue to have theright people in the right place with the right expertise and service.
“So far we’ve met the demands of customers and stakeholders all across the world. Bymaintaining our core focus on science and technology that is how we will continue to provide theservices they want, how we will continue to grow.”
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