Great organizations don’t become great through hope, and they certainly don’t remain great through luck. It takes commitment to a mission and the ability to execute that mission through process improvement and the continuous development of team members.

Fonterra is a 150-year-old New Zealand-based company that exports dairy products to more than 140 nations across the globe. It is a co-operative that is owned by more than 10,000 individual dairy farmers in New Zealand. As befits the largest company in New Zealand and one of the biggest dairy producers in the world, Fonterra has a well-developed food safety auditing program. They employ more than 200 internal auditors who help the company and its suppliers ensure compliance with voluntary and customer standards, GFSI schemes such as FSSC 22000, and various local and regional regulations.

Fonterra is unquestionably a great company, which it proves every day—in no small measure through the empowerment of leaders throughout the organization. Some of this is due to their work with Exemplar Global to recognize their cohort of internal auditors.

A problem, a conversation, a solution

In 2022, Fonterra and Exemplar Global began working together to develop a program to recognize the Fonterra organization and provide personnel certification to a pilot group of internal auditors. Heading up the program development and implementation was Fonterra’s National Quality Assurance Manager–Central/Global Internal Food Safety Audit Lead Debra Snyman and, on the Exemplar Global side, Technical Operations Manager for Food Safety Erin Unwin along with Project Director Wendy Edwards.

“The idea for this program came from a conversation I had with Wendy Edwards about 18 months ago,” says Snyman. “We at Fonterra wanted to create a program that would be internationally recognized and enhance the work we were already doing to develop our internal food safety auditors. At the time, Exemplar Global didn’t really have a program to recognize an entire organization and certify those internal auditors as a group. Both Wendy and I realized at that moment the huge opportunity for collaboration between our two organizations.”

One of the issues facing Fonterra at the time was that some of its key customers did not recognize the credibility of Fonterra’s food safety auditors because they weren’t independently certified.

“This was a real challenge for Fonterra,” says Edwards. “When Debra and I spoke about this in 2022, we wondered what it would look like if their internal auditors held an independent certification with Exemplar Global. What difference might that make? And that was where this pilot program began.”

The program that Snyman, Edwards, and Unwin devised would grant Exemplar Global recognition of Fonterra overall for its excellence within the food safety industry and provide qualifying Fonterra internal auditors with personnel certification. To date, 10 Fonterra professionals have successfully completed the program and received their certification.

“Putting together this pilot program was a collaborative effort,” says Edwards. “The Exemplar Global team put together the requirements for what we needed to see from a recognized organization. The auditor requirements—the technical details of what a Fonterra internal food safety auditor needed to be able to do, to effectively audit a distribution center, for instance—were created by Fonterra.”

Lessons learned

Fonterra and Exemplar Global have both reaped significant rewards from the recognized organization program and the ability to certify internal auditors.

“It means a lot for us to be able to take our internal auditor capability and lift it up to the next level,” says Snyman. “Exemplar Global coming in with all their knowledge gave us a really good, robust framework for our corporate recognition as well as the independent certification of our team of internal auditors.”

In helping solve Fonterra’s issues around third-party recognition, the Exemplar Global team gained significant insight into the general parameters of an organization-wide program. The lessons learned are transferable to organizations in many sectors, covering a range of standards and schemes. It’s a valuable addition to the Exemplar Global portfolio of offerings that serves the conformity assessment industry.

“I think the key learning for Exemplar Global is that we can add huge value to employers by recognizing their people,” says Edwards. “Internal auditors are really the unsung heroes in the world of quality assurance, engineering, or food safety. We took the opportunity to advocate for and recognize these people as the professionals they are.”

Organizations that are committed to internal auditing, either for their own processes or those of close suppliers and partners, can benefit from the third-party validation offered by Exemplar Global through this recognized organization program. Exemplar Global’s international reputation for rigorous assessment of auditing professionals means that organizations like Fonterra who participate in this program reap great benefits. The internal quality assurance that comes from this extra layer of certification (not to mention the benefit of promoting such rigor to the market) is invaluable.

Looking ahead

Fewer than five percent of Fonterra’s internal auditing team has been certified by Exemplar Global through this recognized organization program. Clearly, Fonterra is just scratching the surface of this pilot.

“The feedback from the participants of the pilot has been incredibly positive,” Snyman states. “There was a real sense of self-esteem that our auditors got from the Exemplar Global certification. I wish I could just wave a magic wand and pass our other 200-plus global auditors through the program immediately. I love the program and really see the benefit.”

As far as the Exemplar Global team is concerned, Fonterra was an ideal first partner for this new program.

“The level of professionalism was always there,” says Edwards, talking about the baseline level of experience and process expertise inherent in Fonterra’s culture. “It just wasn’t recognized in a formal way by a third party like Exemplar Global. We gained the awareness that there are some excellent organizations and people out there that we hadn’t yet been able to recognize, and this program gave us a way to do that.

“We worked together with Fonterra very closely,” Edwards continues. “They brought an amazing amount of knowledge and well-developed procedures to the table, which we enhanced through our independent assessment skills and formal requirements. It’s been an interesting and effective collaboration, and we’ve both seen a lot of success through it.”

Ultimately, this pilot program with Fonterra, as well as others that are being developed in additional key sectors, is intended to show the power of recognition both in and outside of an organization. Although the advantages are notable when dealing with suppliers and customers, the internal cultural benefits drive the biggest wins for organizations like Fonterra.

“I’m incredibly passionate about this program,” concludes Snyman. “I believe there’s so much value in continuing to build capability with people and giving them credit for their achievements. That’s what this certification program does—it really recognizes the food safety auditors in our organization. I just think it’s awesome.”

To learn more about Exemplar Global’s Recognized Organization program, please email here.