Tetra Pak, the world’s leading food processing and packaging solutions company, shared insights on how it adapted to new ways of working amidst the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic has increased general concerns for health and safety, including the safety of food. Tetra Pak has remained committed to its brand promise of making food safe and available, everywhere, and provided uninterrupted end-to-end support to their customers and the wider community, ensuring the highest standards of food safety.
Building on more than 60 years of experience in food safety, the company has helped keep food safe, with the possibility to store for long periods of time without the need for preservatives. Tetra Pak’s aseptic systems guarantee that there is no presence of bacteria and the products cannot spoil. But because bacteria are much more robust than any virus, including COVID-19, there is absolutely no chance of the virus surviving in Tetra Pak’s aseptic systems.
The company’s leadership in both food processing and protective packaging technologies has been helping millions of people in Thailand to have access to safe food. This included the school milk program, which continued with parents picking up the milk from the schools to deliver to their children at home.
Tetra Pak’s priority focus has been to work in collaboration with customers and stakeholders to ensure the food supply chain was maintained. During the past few months the company has worked with no interruptions, carrying on with providing packaging materials, spare parts, equipment installations and technical support on normal schedule. In order to continue to deliver on the promise to protect what’s good, Tetra Pak focused on two key areas: protecting people and protecting food.
Protecting people, starting from the employees, was the first priority right from the outset. Tetra Pak was one of the first companies in the world to initiate a completely new hygiene and cleaning regime for all the facilities as early as January. The company also ran employee education campaigns to raise awareness of the virus transmission, best-practice hygiene standards, physical distancing regulations, and use of protective equipment. Many employees transitioned to working from home with flexible working hours with no interruptions in customer service. Tetra Pak continued to supply spare parts, allowing customers to maintain production lines running.
Protecting food during the COVID-19 crisis meant ensuring that the customers maintain food supply to the communities in Thailand. The customers needed stability and large quantities of raw materials for the continuous processes they operate, so logistics were critical. With the change in consumption patterns, some manufacturers needed to change formats, or to maximise output of certain product lines with high demands. Tetra Pak services team were supporting customers by ensuring maximum up-time, output and production efficiency.
“We continued to work with customers, suppliers, and local authorities in constant effort to achieve our goals of protecting people and protecting food,” said Bert Jan Post, the Managing Director of Tetra Pak (Thailand) Limited. “Thanks to our employees, to our customers, and to our partners we have managed to remain committed to our promise of keeping food available, everywhere, helping communities respond to the challenges they faced”.
