Quality

Quality has been accorded the same degree of scrutiny as safety, as we continue our strategic journey toward becoming a leader in Health, Nutrition & Bioscience. Our products that find applications in health and nutrition reach millions of consumers. For example, a single kilogram of vitamin A can fortify tons of infant formula used by thousands of babies and infants, or hundreds of tons of animal feed used in the egg industry. As a consequence, the impact of our products, and consequently the impact of their quality, is critical to the safety of our end-consumers.

Embedding quality in our organization

We focus on three areas to ensure that quality is embedded across our organization. As a first step, we run quality risk assessments to identity and eliminate quality risks. Secondly, based on our risk assessments, we implement cross-company quality standards, with a focus on continuous improvement of our technical standards, and the deployment of technical solutions where needed. Finally, we have the objective to have a quality learning organization in which we share feedback and alert each other about incidents and near misses and undertake a through follow-up. We aim to embed the right mindset and behavior, ensuring that our colleagues understand why our quality requirements and procedures are important.

It is the responsibility of our employees to ensure that quality is embedded in how we serve our customers. Trainings on relevant quality standards are made available to all employees and are mandatory for target groups, to we embed the right mindset and behaviors in our organization. In addition, we have a mandatory training on Root cause analysis for our quality experts so that these are performed in a standardized way that is comparable to our approach within SHE (Safety, Health and Environment). Through standardized root cause analysis, we bring our expertise to the next level and ensure that the conclusions from an incident are translated into the right and impactful corrective actions. Through this, we build a learning organization on quality.

Customer centricity and quality

Customer centricity and our approach to customer complaints and quality incidents is central to ensuring that our products deliver the quality that is expected by our customers and end-consumers. We implement a structured process around complaints and incidents to ensure agility and customer focus. This includes setting internal targets levels on customer complaint ratios and complaint response times. Performance and related learnings from complaints are regularly shared and discussed from the shop floor to the Executive Committee and Supervisory Board level.