Food & Beverage - A Recipe For Safety Culture

The food and beverage industry is recognized as the largest manufacturing industry in both the UK and Ireland with an estimated turnover of over £95 billion and employs approximately 400,000 people.

In the past 20 years, there has been a remarkable reduction in injuries and occupational ill-health. Despite this encouraging trend, a targeted effort is required to ensure further reductions. HSE research indicates that positive steps by management could have prevented injury in about 70% of incidents, and action by workers a further 10%.

EcoOnline is currently working with food and beverage manufacturers of all sizes to improve their overall health and safety procedures. Our customers are benefiting from using our software through the creation of a zero harm safety culture, allowing greater access to safety data across an organization, save administration time on low-value activities, and reduced management costs including administration costs, lost time spent, insurance premiums, and solicitors fees.

Hilton Foods

Hilton Foods UK is part of the Hilton Foods Group, the largest dedicated packer of red meat in Europe with over 2,500 employees across its six European sites. They achieved a landmark year in 2015 as it was the first time in their history they had Zero Reported Claims. David Hoey, the Safety Officer at Hilton Foods UK, identified how utilizing a health and safety management system as the main reason for this success and highlighted the following key areas:

• Increased communication of incident reporting encouraged employees to discuss preventative actions rather than corrective actions.
• David has reduced his time spent on safety administration and reporting from 20% of his workload to approximately 2 hours a week.
• Automated reporting allowed the MD and key users to be notified immediately of any serious incidents and receive tailored reports by email for all sites.
• Audits can be carried out offline on a tablet or smartphone rather than having to transfer paper records onto a spreadsheet manually.
• David uses the time freed up to engage with employees in the workplace and to investigate the root cause of accidents.
• Ability to make administrative changes without the cost or time involved in a developer.

Another achievement David credited to the utilization of a health and safety management system was an impressive annual saving of £70,000 on insurance premiums in only one of their sites as a result of Zero Reported Claims. This figure was identified given the annual average number of claims and the annual average claim payout. The cost savings relate specifically to insurance savings and do not take into account what they would have paid on doctors, physio, production downtime, etc

For more information as to how EcoOnline is working with food and beverage manufacturers to improve their health and safety management procedures, why not contact one of our friendly product experts or even Request A Demo.