Quality policy/HSE

Commitment to quality and respect of the environment are two of Lesaffre’s major concerns on a daily basis.

From the time the customer places an order up until the delivery of the product, Lesaffre undertakes to guarantee the quality of its products and services.
In correlation with this rigorous quality policy, and to meet tomorrow’s ecological challenges, Lesaffre also undertakes to commit itself to a voluntary environmental policy.

Environment

Our desire to build a successful business goes hand-in-hand with a real sense of social responsibility. Environmental improvements account for 15% of our industrial expenditure, and whenever we build a new factory, we allocate 20 to 30% of our investment to environmental improvements.

Producing, recycling and creating value with our by-products, optimizing water consumption and encouraging energy saving all help to protect human livelihoods. Lesaffre is committed to limiting the environmental side effects of its operations, so has taken pains to acquire scientific expertise in upgrading by-products and processing effluents.

Lesaffre believes that sustainability means more than environmental concerns and necessarily implies an investment in numerous team initiatives to support local populations in an important number of countries where Lesaffre is working such as Argentina, Morocco, Turkey, China… No less than thirty best practices have been listed in this domain throughout the world. All these concrete initiatives highlight Lesaffre commitment to feeding and protecting the planet more effectively.

Integrating our business into the environmental cycle

Lesaffre uses raw materials sourced from farming to produce yeast and favors the return to the land of its co-products.

Saving water

The company’s efforts focus on optimizing water use and preserving the quality of this natural resource. Thus, the company favors the installation of a system called Cleaning in Place. (CIP). This process consists of using the same water several times over to wash equipment.

Energy savings

Lesaffre conducts research enabling it to develop economical energy procedures. The company is also using retrieval procedures using biomass energy. Furthermore, a permanent work designed to optimize our energy use is being conducted in all of our factories in order to make savings on fossil energy.

Furthermore, as the European Union complies with the Kyoto protocol, the Lesaffre factories respect the national plans for allocating greenhouse emission quotas.

Quality

Lesaffre makes every effort to ensure continued progress in terms of quality thanks to its experience dating back many years and to its experience on the international front.

Lesaffre is one of the leading players in the agri-food industry to have developed organizations dedicated to the quality of its products and services.
It was also the first yeast producer to have had its quality assurance systems certified by independent third-party bodies.

Furthermore, Lesaffre has entered into numerous specialized and varied partnerships with specialists in the public field (universities…), the private field (research centers, collection of strains) and the institutional field (engineering communities, COFALEC).

Quality’s virtuous circle

Lesaffre takes particular care to ensure that quality is taken into account from the moment the customer places an order up until the delivery of the product.

1- Customer expectations
Meeting our customers’ expectations means defining a product which guarantees them:
food safety
a level of product performance suited to the process (traditional bread-making, industrial bread production…) and to the applications (production of agro-fuel, Danish pastries, health industries …).
It is also a question of offering a service with the product (suitable life cycle, storage constraints taken into account….).
This is carried out throughout the year, irrespective of the supplier site).

2- Selection of raw materials:
“Buying well” for Lesaffre consists of guaranteeing that the raw material is:
available, (secure world sourcing),
suitable (suppliers chosen via pilot tests),
consistent (immediate post-delivery inspections, auditing partners)
optimized in the Quality/Price pairing (precise definition of the requirement and adjustment, partnership, regular revisions).

3- Manufacturing conditions:
The choice of equipment and its place of installation is an integral part of the notion of quality (In Place Cleaning, Forwards-Only Sequence…). Identical procedures throughout the world (sterilization, cleaning, filtering….) which enable the standardization of methods, their circulation and updating.
Our quality programs are based on a risk study (HACCP).

4- Tests and validation:
Numerous tests are developed to validate the products before marketing them (physical/chemical and bacteriological tests, sensory analyses…) thus permitting to simulate their ageing.

5- Making available:
The conditions for transportation, storage, traceability are studied precisely to define the life cycle, the cold chain… to be respected in order to preserve all the products’ properties right through until delivery.

Evaluation satisfaction
Customer expectations and the conditions for using products change constantly. This is why the Quality Department strives to assess each stage of the manufacturing process, from the raw material to the finished product.
A series of tests and a monitoring system are put in place to ensure customer satisfaction.