November 11, 2013
When it comes to corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability approaches, the New Zealand dairy industry is a decade behind European competitors, according to Fonterra chief executive Theo Spierings.
Since the false alarm over botulism in infant formula hit the company in early August, Spierings was frank to a senior Auckland business audience about the challenge to rebuild Fonterra's reputation.
Part of the problem had not been a lack of initiatives, but too many that were little more than charitable donations and pursued without focus on the company's strategic needs.
For that reason, Fonterra was now concentrating on its Milk in Schools Programme, partly because Spierings said he found it devastating to know the fact that some 27% of New Zealand children had no milk before lunch.
Recognising clean water as a fundamental part of Fonterra's claims to high quality products is throwing its weight behind efforts to clean up New Zealand's fresh waterways.
The two programmes are linked by having farmers deliver milk to schools and children visit farms to plant streambeds and wetlands to help control farms' runoff into waterways.
On Fonterra's handling of the false botulism scare, Spierings said the company had learnt a lot about "how layered and difficult sometimes we are".
What began with a torch lens being lost in processing cascaded into poor decisions, including that he should have been informed back in May when the co-operative's food safety scientists decided they needed to test for a bacterium strain capable of causing botulism.
It was a straightforward "yes" or "no" question for management as to whether testing for botulism was a serious issue requiring escalation to the chief executive's suite.
Fonterra had since established a whistle-blower's hotline for staff to report any qualms about food safety straight to the food safety unit.
Even before that, management at the plant where the torch lens was lost should have ensured the reprocessed whey protein powder in question was kept out of the production chain for use in infant formula.
