FoodBev Media spoke to William Grayson, global marketing communications director at Diversey, about the company’s #ProtectingLifeTogether campaign, and its efforts to create effective hygiene solutions for the food and beverage industry.
William Grayson, global marketing communications director, Diversey
To begin, could you briefly outline Diversey and its core objectives as a global hygiene and cleaning company?
Diversey is globally acknowledged for high-performance hygiene, infection prevention and cleaning solutions. Our innovative products, systems and services bring chemicals, machines and sustainability together to help our customers achieve the safest and most efficient production. We’re also equally well known for our distinctive consultative partnership approach.
We fundamentally believe that cleaning and hygiene should not be a privilege, but part of life’s essentials. This outlook reflects our mission to protect and care for people in all the global sectors in which we operate. Our objectives haven’t changed; however, the challenges of the pandemic have clearly reminded us of how we all depend on each other. These challenges are now being superseded by the urgent need to respond to other issues, such as climate change and resource scarcity. As disruption increases, many businesses are having to contemplate a future of change, or at the very least significant realignment.
It’s why we view the broad implementation of protection as another essential. Our customer’s needs are always at the heart of everything we do and protection is a focus to unite their businesses, move them forward and drive growth as the food and beverage (F&B) landscape shifts for us all. Recent global events re-emphasise the absolute necessity to maintain efficient, safe hygienic production. It’s also why we’ve enshrined protection as the lifeblood of our approach and the solutions we offer.
How is your #ProtectingLifeTogether campaign helping to improve, guide and support companies within the F&B industry?
We identified the pandemic as an appropriate moment to invoke protection as a guide and inspiration. Prioritising this core value echoes our existing commitment and is summarised in our tagline: Protecting Life. Together. It places protection at the heart of every aspect of our customer relationships throughout the global F&B industry. The accompanying F+B icon is a celebration of our distinctive strengths and the common values we all share. Protection also provides a significant differential in the wider marketplace.
Protection is a strategic, powerful and practical expression of our day-to-day involvement in customer’s operations. This, combined with our deep understanding of their needs, creates a sense of responsibility we feel acutely as a company.
What does this mean for our customers? Well, they can look forward to a renewed consistency and focus in protecting the health of their employees, the integrity of their processes and the hygiene of their production facilities – all designed to safeguard their business and brands in the future.
We will continue to deliver what our customers expect of us, based on our guiding pillars of efficiency, safety, sustainability and protection. Regardless of circumstances, you can be confident protection is paramount in all we do. As your trusted supplier, looking after your needs and concentrating on our mutual success is, and always will be, our highest priority.
What elements/sectors does Diversey’s campaign cover? Why have you decided to focus on these sectors specifically?
In common with our customers, who have been going through similar processes of realignment, we’ve also had to redefine our response and resources. The pandemic has raised expectations of new levels of visible hygiene. Ensuring your business is fit to meet this expectation, and whatever else the future may bring, is essential.
Our campaign is one of reaffirmation and reassurance, bringing together the universal values that define and link all five sectors in Diversey F&B’s focus: Food Production, Beverage and Brewing, Dairy, Dairy Farming and Life Sciences. We view this as a moment of reset and renewal with – Protecting Life. Together – a statement of intent. Our campaign is directed across all our operations, whether that be delivering disinfection and cleaning regimes, world-class hygiene, innovation and collaboration, or our knowledge-based services.
Going above and beyond is in our culture. We’re committed to making our customer’s production more efficient. Our routine day-to-day involvement means we’re emotionally invested in our customer’s ambitions. Our approach looks to safeguard customers’ businesses, drive productivity improvements, lower total cost of ownership and protect their brands.
Are you working on any innovative hygiene solutions that you would like our readers to know about?
As we’re all aware, maintaining food safety is of prime importance in the F&B industry. You depend on your clean-in-place (CIP) system to ensure your processing equipment is clean, to drive operational efficiency and your bottom line. However, cleaning procedures typically happen in a closed system, leaving your critical data hidden. This, and the fact that substantially more than half of CIP systems run unvalidated, is a major concern. Especially as any cleaning failure risks contamination, which in turn has serious financial and reputational implications for your brand.
We have recently launched IntelliCIP – our new cloud-based remote monitoring platform. This is a step-change in data analysis for the industry. IntelliCIP lifts the veil on CIP systems to make your unseen data visible, unlocking information typically buried within your automation system or manual tracking.
The new platform securely collates and processes your production CIP data to give you a quick view of CIP processes for any date range, specific unit, CIP circuit, or recipe. It’s designed to ensure stricter hygienic compliance and enable responsive action when compliance with your validated parameters has not been met.
What makes these solutions particularly unique?
Real-time insight into performance measures the true effectiveness of each CIP clean you undertake. The result of this continuous process monitoring is actionable insight you can implement in a quick and focused manner. You can ensure hygienic compliance and an overview of chemicals and utilities to track your water, energy and chemical consumption. You can also effectively manage your KPIs for food safety, efficiency and quality improvements to achieve significant savings, efficiencies and enhance your overall competitive edge in F&B industries typically defined by tight margins.
Our platform addresses two key long-term challenges. First, the issue of an automation system that may go unchecked. Secondly, it’s designed to confirm whether your system is doing something wrong or might not be meeting your expected targets. The clear advantage over a traditional system is identifying whether you are cleaning enough – or even too much. This results in savings on chemicals, energy and water, or specifies if you’re not applying enough time or chemicals to the process.
IntelliCIP’s indicators also identify opportunities over time where you can add value and optimise your production. You can be confident of ensuring food safety, improving operational efficiency and sustainability, while optimising your system without any negative effect on your cleaning results.
Why is this such an important message right now?
Resource management and process efficiency are critical as we navigate the post-pandemic challenges to business and aim to maintain a consistent level of output. It is more important than ever to be in control of every aspect of your process, including the resources going into your cleaning processes, including considering downtime. IntelliCIP is one development that enables a finer level of control. As well as a compliance indicator following each cleaning cycle, the system makes sense of the sea of data available to guide decisions on efficiency.
Without embracing technology and tools such as IntelliCIP the challenge of reaching higher levels of efficiency and food safety while consuming fewer resources will not be met.
Anything else you would like to tell us about Diversey and your work?
While we are discussing resource usage, every business also needs to confront their water usage in the context of climate change, resource scarcity and operational sustainability, yet still protect product safety. Water treatment can help squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of water’s process value, reducing your costs and ultimately the cost to our planet; while incorporating an approach that protects your employees, customers and the communities in which you work.
Water is fundamental to F&B production and presents a complex multifaceted issue. Water quality dictates factory hygiene, and vice versa, since neither element functions effectively without the other. Water quality is also key to critical cleaning processes and protocols that protect and ensure the safety and success of each production run and help avoid product contamination.
Establishing water treatment best practice drives compliance toward maintaining the highest standards, significant resource savings, and reducing potential burdens from wastewater charges. Our new technology partnership with global water treatment application specialist Solenis enables access for our customers in all sectors to the broadest range of innovative solutions to fulfil expectations of water quality at every stage. Diversey’s total solution manages hygiene and water quality as a complete system to provide opportunities to create significant additional value.
As your single point of contact, we focus exclusively on optimising your total water usage, by working to increase efficiency, protect assets, meet regulatory requirements, promote water reuse and reduce the sustainability footprint of your operations. Our tools drive a clear and consistent strategy to make sense of the complexity that surrounds water and deliver crucial savings at every stage. Essential when your water treatment policy is becoming a key differential – influencing investment, consumer choice and market success.
For more information, visit Diversey’s website.
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