In this issue of Building & Industry Today, we are delighted to select Christeyns for our Industry Excellence Award.
It has been an excellent twelve months for Warrington-based company: Food Hygiene, part of Christeyns UK. The company won the coveted ‘Training Company of the Year’ at the SOFHT Awards in 2023. The annual awards, now in their 19th year, recognise and celebrate excellence within the food industry and its associated industries.
Christeyns Food Hygiene excel in designing hygiene chemicals and equipment and for the purpose of this award, have now been recognised by the industry for its cutting-edge educational platform for the training of hygiene professionals.
Food hygiene is part of the fundamental fabric of Christeyn’s operations, ensuring absolute food and drink safety across all sectors of the business.
The UK food hygiene division was established in 1989 by the then-owner John Bell, whilst the global European parent company was founded way back in 1946 in Gent, Belgium by Joseph Christeyns.
Christeyns Food Hygiene provides innovative hygiene solutions and specialised technical support for the food and beverage industry, ensuring compliance with procedures, legislation and industry codes of practice. The company supplies and supports the food, dairy and beverage sector from the Warrington headquarters.
We spoke to Chris Bayliss: UK Sales Director for more insight into this food hygiene Powerhouse, “Whilst our revenue comes from the supply and sale of detergents, disinfectants and specialty hygiene products; our main role is to support the food safety management and hygiene systems in our customer’s operations.”
“We see ourselves as an integral part of their efforts to produce a safe, wholesome product with effective controls on contaminants that could result in consumer harm. Our services include all aspects of hygiene support from training and education, cleaning method statement production, engineering solutions to enable the effective storage and application of our products to the provision of personal protective equipment, cleaning cost optimisation (especially for CIP regimes using our unique InSite-CIP software) and fault-finding/inspection when the inevitable challenges occur in a fast-moving sector.”
“We have our food hygiene headquarters in Warrington as previously mentioned; however, we also have our Professional Hygiene division in Whalley Bridge and our laundry operation in Bradford. Across Europe we have a presence in all EU member states as well as both the USA, South America, North Africa and Australasia.”
“With our field team drawn from industry, we truly understand the challenges that our customers face day-to-day and can devise practical, realistic solutions that help to resolve food safety and product integrity issues. This is evident from our training that has been developed by experts in the field, our engineering solutions which deliver the detergents and disinfectants to precisely where they need to be used and our hygiene support systems that have been developed around both the needs of the industry and the requirements of food safety third-party standards such as BRCGS, ISO 2200 and GFSI.”
“We are the most highly connected supplier in our sector with representation at BFBi, Campden BRI, SOFHT, The Chilled Food Association and Anaphylaxis UK. This involvement in industry stake-holder groups enables us to not only add our expertise back into the industry, but also enables us to horizon-scan the direction of travel for our customers enabling them to be better prepared for challenges and changes ahead.”
“We can do this primarily because we are a privately-owned family firm with the flexibility and autonomy to react to industry challenges without having to raise project requests to shareholders and multi-national headquarters’ where the need for change may be less well understood.”
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Christeyns Food Hygiene deployed a flexible approach to supplying, supporting and developing customers. Christeyns was able to respond quickly, through the supply of regular products for cleaning and disinfecting food contact surfaces. The company went beyond this though and provided non-food contact (fomite) surface cleaning, hand care and disinfectant products to keep the population as safe as possible during this period.
“We experienced challenges in our supply chain; however, we are proud of the fact that we didn’t let any of our customers down or fail to supply them with suitable products at any time during that period or since. We quickly recommissioned a hand sanitiser production unit in the space of six weeks to ensure a suitable supply of the only BSI Kitemarked hand sanitiser, demonstrating again our commitment not only to supply, but also providing the best quality product on the market.
Though COVID-19 coverage has since reduced in newspaper column inches, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the latest COVID-19 variant: JN.1 of ‘interest’ due to its rapidly increasing spread, especially as we head deep into the winter months in many countries.
“With that in mind, Christeyns has continued to supply optimised cleaning and disinfectant products as we slowly head towards a completely post-COVID world,” added Chris.
The pro-active response of Christeyns during the COVID-19 pandemic shows that the company ‘walks the walk’ and is wholeheartedly committed to developing customer’s operations to help them produce safe, wholesome products each and every time.
“The Christeyns’ teams have a fundamental understanding that starting with clean, hygienic food contact surfaces is the cornerstone of food safety and a pre-requisite for all third-party standards and requirements. We strive to ensure that not only are our chemical products best in class, but also our support services and software offer exceptional value for money and control over the essential task of delivering clean, hygienic equipment.”
“Our training academy offers one of the largest suites of both traditional, hybrid and e-learning available in our industry and was awarded the Society of Food Hygiene & Technology’s ‘Best Training Company’ award for 2023 as recognition of our commitment to learner-centric training.”
“Our engineering capabilities have been augmented through our partnerships with world-leading equipment manufacturers Foamico and H&M Disinfection with their over 20-year expertise in the design and installation of hygiene equipment. This initiative greatly expands our ability to design, supply, install, commission and support the essential equipment needed to effectively apply and utilise our ‘best-in-class’ detergent and disinfectant formulations.”
“However, our developments aren’t purely limited to training and engineering. Our specialist teams are constantly striving to identify and bring to our sector techniques and equipment that can better enable our customers to manage their food safety risks with some real game-changers in the world of food safety in development.”
Christeyns Food Hygiene is proud to be entering its 35th year of supporting the sector and has maintained a loyal customer base from the offset.
“Looking ahead to early 2024 and beyond, we will continue to do what we have always done – supporting our customers and maintaining our commitment to continuously improve hygiene systems and food safety management systems. This is done through the ‘best-in-class’ chemical products, excellence in engineering and dedication in training.”
“We are delighted to have received the Industry Excellence Award as it is a validation of not only our products & services but also the hard work and commitment of our teams around the UK and aboard,” concluded Chris.
For more information, please see the website below:
T +44 (0)1925 234696
UK-foodinfo@christeyns.com
https://www.christeyns.com