Is your factory safe?

In a new webinar that Food Manufacture readers can still watch for free now​​, four speakers tackled the topic of ‘Safeguarding your factory and supply chain’ within the F&B context.

Touching on areas such as supply chain risk, ESG compliance, health and safety law, leveraging technology and lessons learned from past incidents, this article will detail some of the key takeaways from the session.

You can even watch a short clip of Anthony Hanley, senior vice president for supply chain compliance at Alcumus SafeContractor, who featured on the webinar alongside Elliot Kenton (partner at Weightmans), Clare Bottle (chief executive at the UK Warehousing Association) and Jeff Marston (group safety and environmental manager at AB Agri).

‘Health and safety culture needs to come from the top’

Kenton, a health and safety lawyer at Weightmans, was first to present, focusing on the topic of managing safety in food and drink manufacturing through a legal lens.

“Food and drink manufacturing has an unenviable position in industry when it comes to safety,”​ he began, pointing to statistics that illustrate the challenges facing the sector.

“Therefore, a lot of my talk will focus on being proactive. There will be a health and safety incident or a near miss in your particular business at some point and unfortunately the most pessimistic advice, but best advice you can receive is to prepare for the worst.”​

He then went onto explain what adequate preparation entails, touching on requirements around documentation, policy, assessments and training.

“Health and safety culture needs to be embedded from the top down,”​ Kenton continued.

“It's not enough that there's a health and safety officer or a few health and safety officers at middle management level. There needs to be someone that is senior and preferably at board level that understands and knows about health and safety and takes responsibility for it.”​

Next, Kenton explained how he has worked with several clients in recent years on preparing instant response protocols: “Protocols are critical when an incident does occur as they help ensure that panic does not spread across the business​

“We frequently help clients with amplifying their protocol by stress testing it with mock incidents.”​

To finish, he argued that it is incumbent on a firm to conduct their own investigation following an incident, in addition to any Health and Safety Executive (HSE) probe, so that they can then learn from what went wrong.

“The materials gathered as part of that investigation are likely to be legally privileged, which means that they can act as a shield from disclosure from third parties and gives an organisation time to conduct a thorough investigation as to what has happened,”​ he said.

“A business can benefit from lessons learnt following an internal investigation and there are a number of recommendations when we're assisting clients with internal investigations that companies and organisations adopt.”​

“An internal investigation will also cement an operator's good faith response and will usually lead to positive change in health and safety culture. You're showing your people, your workers, your employees and third parties that you are taking health and safety seriously, and that does promote a positive health and safety culture.”​

Watch more from Kenton’s presentation by signing up for free here​​.

‘Important not to get complacent’

Bottle spoke second and began by discussing the work of the UK Warehousing Association, a trade body that represents with 10,000 member companies.

“We're all about talking about warehousing, raising industry standards, building community and helping our members,”​ she said.

“Manufacturing is a high risk sector, but warehouses today in the UK are generally very safe. Nevertheless, it's important not to get complacent.”​

Moving on, Bottle discussed some examples of health and safety incidents that have taken place at warehouses in recent years, starting with a fire that took place at an Ocado facility in Andover in 2019.

“This was caused by a robot collision at their 2,040 square foot facility and the fire service weren't really familiar with the premises so they relied quite heavily on the operator in order to help them tackle the blaze,” ​she explained.

“Around 300,000 customer orders were cancelled because of this fire. Nobody from Ocado was hurt, although some firefighters did have to be treated for smoke inhalation. When a second fire occurred at an Ocado warehouse a few years later, it was contained and managed much faster with much less business interruption due to the lesson learned.”​

The next incident featured was a racking collapse from 2016 at a cheese warehouse in Shropshire.

“This highlights the need for warehousing companies to carry out regular racking inspections,”​ continued Bottle.

“On this occasion there 20,000 boxes of cheese on pallets, with each pallet weighing about 1.3 tonnes. That's quite heavy, but not unusual in the food industry, and the entire racking system collapsed from about 18 metres high. One worker was trapped for over nine hours, but they did make a full recovery and nobody else was hurt.”​

The final example that Bottle referenced resulted in the tragic death of an employee who had been operating a forklift truck called a VNA, which is used in very narrow aisles.

“While driving a VNA truck at a warehouse in Desborough, the employee’s vehicle struck another VNA in the same aisle,”​ she explained.

“Two VNAs should never be in the same aisle but staff had routinely ignored alarms. As a result, when the vehicle toppled over, the worker fell 14 metres and sadly his injuries were fatal.”​

Summarising, Bottle said that the incidents show the crucial nature of building a culture of safety: “We know from safety culture theory that a combination of peer pressure and enforcement are most likely to deliver success.”​

Watch more from Bottle’s presentation by signing up for free here​​.

‘Weaknesses in the in-house contractor approval process’

Marston was third to present, introducing AB Agri and its role as the agricultural division of Associated British Foods.

Operating in 100 countries and employing 3,000 people, it manufactures animal feed, farm animal feeds and offer nutritional based solutions for farm livestock.

“We provide feed for one in six chickens globally while we are also responsible for analysing the health of 98% of the dairy cows and 50% of the milk quality in the UK,”​ he explained.

Moving onto the topic at hand, Marston shared details of an incident that occurred back in 2012 at an AB Agri site in Scotland. After setting out to repair a fat tank, the plant caught fire and this resulted in a £1.6m insurance claim.

“First and foremost, nobody was hurt, so our emergency evacuation procedures worked as planned,”​ Marston recalled.

“The site was evacuated and we provided the emergency services with all the relevant information. Then our business continuity plan kicked in and we were able to supply our customers without any interruption, which is quite a major achievement because the factory was largely destroyed, but we were fully back up and running in three weeks.”​

While the firm was able to mitigate the worst of the damage, Marston said that a full investigation was undertaken into what had gone wrong.

“When we did the analysis it highlighted major weaknesses in our in-house contractor approval process,”​ he said.

“We didn't have any particular checks on contractor staff training and the contractor who we offered the repair job was actually an electrical contractor. But we had been using him for years and the team liked him.”​

Since the investigation, AB Agri has been on a journey of improvement to try and ensure that a repeat of this incident can be avoided.

“It has taken the best part of 11 years to work this through the organisation to get to the stage where we are now,” ​Marston said.

“We've moved our contractor approval programme from being in-house to external, and our selection is now restricted to approve contractors. We also run an ongoing contractor management training programme throughout the organisation, which we repeat every three months.​

“There are still areas where improvements can be made of course, but we are in a far better position now than we were in 2012.”​

Watch more from Marston’s presentation by signing up for free here​​.

‘Reliable partners are crucial to addressing health and safety challenges’

To conclude the presentations, Hanley spoke about the work that Alcumus SafeContractor does to support the food and drink industry.

“We help companies ensure that they have a health and safety compliant and ESG verified supply chain,”​ he told the panel.

“By embedding and integrating robust vetting processes that build specific risk profiles to suppliers and contractors, we provide F&B firms peace of mind that everyone on-site is only completing the work they have been authorised to.”​

Hanley explained that this work is particularly important given some of the challenges facing the food and drink industry in the UK around health and safety, labour shortages and compliance with new ESG targets.

“Food manufacturing and processing is one of the top 10 most at risk industries, but only 16% of brands are using technology based systems to ensure the integrity of their supply chains,”​ he said.

“Reliable partners are crucial to addressing these challenges and reversing the negative trends that we are seeing currently.”​

Next up, Hanley pointed to the way in which incoming regulation would create new challenges for manufacturers: “Governments worldwide are implementing increasingly stringent regulations, but many companies lack the in-house expertise to manage this effectively.​

“Complex regulatory environments disrupt operations, especially across large scale supply chains spanning multiple sites. To assist, Alcumus SafeContractor provides comprehensive support to ensure that clients can meet these regulatory standards by utilising up-to-date information on relevant legislation, expert guidance on compliance and tools for tracking and reporting.”​

Hanley then built on the example used by Marston, noting that factory fires have become increasingly common. This, he argued, has been the result of regulatory gaps, process execution failures and a shortage of skilled labour in warehouses and factories.

“Contractor failures – including performing works without proper qualifications or without the insurance – can have severe consequences,” ​he said.

“But by using proportionate and tailored contractor assessments, we can help manufacturers streamline the process, reduce duplication and mitigate the risk of scope creep.”​

Before finishing, Hanley emphasised the critical role of utilising technology: “It's a game changer for supply chain compliance and operational resilience in the food manufacturing sector. As regulations become more stringent and supply chains become more complex, adopting digital solutions is crucial to keeping your factory operational and compliant.​

“Digitalisation removes manual paper based processes which are prone to errors, while ensuring that all the critical data is accurately captured and easily accessible. With all of your compliance data in one place, managing and accessing information becomes straightforward and efficient.”​

Watch more from Hanley’s presentation by signing up for free here​​.