SafetyCulture

Roma Food Products

Learn how Roma Food Products are investing in skills, infrastructure, and systems like SafetyCulture, to improve, safety, quality, efficiency and innovation.

Australia’s largest gluten and allergen free manufacturer

Exporting to 70+ countries

550+ process improvements in 5 months with SafetyCulture

Local manufacturing on the world stage

Creating great food for healthier living – Roma Food Products know a thing or two about that! They’re an Australian family-owned manufacturer proudly producing allergen-friendly and better-for-you local foods, approaching their seventh decade in business. Pasta, crispbreads, wafers, biscuits, snacks, cereals, flours, baking mixes, and more. Stocked in all the major supermarkets, they’ve got the recipe for great-tasting products that are great for your health.

They’re now exporting to over seventy countries worldwide, and confident that local is still their competitive advantage.

Roma has been able to meet the increasing demand for local and healthy food choices. How? By investing in their people, skills and infrastructure, to improve quality, safety, efficiency and innovation with the SafetyCulture platform. And the result? Accelerated growth.

“We have experienced strong growth over recent years fuelled by increased investment in our people, brands and capability, a continued consumer trend towards plant-based foods and healthy offerings, and the renewed focus on locally-made products. Our vision is to have a Roma Foods product in every family’s pantry. We are getting closer to achieving that all the time.”

Sam Schachna
CEO, Roma Food Products

Nabbing accreditation and nailing excellence

Roma identified that an important opportunity for growth was to obtain Woolworths Supplier Excellence (WSE) accreditation. This invitation-only program provides a series of standards and criteria aligned with global best practice in food safety and quality standards, and international retailing best practice.

Roma had a gap audit that identified a number of aspects that they needed to address in a short amount of time before their first WSE audit. This is where SafetyCulture came into the picture. 

They found a Good Manufacturing Process (GMP) template from the Public Library, adapted it for their business, implemented it, and the improvements began immediately.

In the first 5 months they were able to raise well over 550 actions in SafetyCulture. Impressively, they closed 96% of those, and in doing so were able to transform the company’s standards.

“It really galvanized the Operations Team. We were able to do a lot more through SafetyCulture than we would have been able to do through other systems or processes. If we didn’t have SafetyCulture, there’s no way we would have got to that level when we had the audit.”

Technical & Quality Manager
Roma Food Products

From clunky to agile

Before SafetyCulture, Roma were using a different software setup which was quite extensive but not practical, taking them a long time to complete inspections and develop actions for improvement.

When SafetyCulture was introduced, the technology was embraced – by both the Leadership Team and the frontline workers. The simplicity of the tech made it quick and easy to raise opportunities and any issues by their frontline workers, providing instant visibility to those in management.

“SafetyCulture has empowered our journey of growth and innovation whilst ensuring our priority remains on safe people, safe product and safe data. It hasn’t just unlocked the ability for us to achieve the step change growth that we’ve been able to achieve, but has also allowed us to do it in a manner which is safe, agile and constantly looking for continuous improvement.”

Sam Schachna
CEO, Roma Food Products

Continuing to expand their use of SafetyCulture platform

Roma started their journey with GMP audits but has now expanded into other areas, as different teams and leaders have recognized the value. 

  • Their Production Teams are now all using the same toolbox talk template. 
  • Their Quality Teams are using a template for receiving goods — saving them time by capturing images in one platform; the SafetyCulture platform. 
  • Their Head of People, Safety & Culture has developed a number of safety templates for their Warehouse Production Teams.
  • Their Production Supervisors have been developing a 5S template from the SafetyCulture Public Library.
  • A Covid-19 inspection template has been successfully implemented from the SafetyCulture Public Library.

They’ve also started using Analytics – a SafetyCulture feature that helps teams immediately see the areas they need to focus on. This can become a game-changer, especially for putting together reports to communicate to the business on how they’re performing, what works well, and what doesn’t. Analytics will show trend analysis and graphs in a click, saving the team’s time so they can focus on what really matters.

They’re taking their GMP audits to the next level by using SafetyCulture’s all-in-one mobile Training to assist with the delivery of GMP training to all staff.

“One of the great things about SafetyCulture is that the initial tool was free, allowing us to ensure it was fit for purpose and met our needs before we made any significant financial commitment. From a leadership perspective, this assisted uptake of the SafetyCulture platform within the organisation because the tool had already proved its value and we were confident with the product we were investing in.”

Sam Schachna
CEO, Roma Food Products

Australian manufacturing innovation

There are challenges for Australian manufacturing. Some say it’s not an even playing field because Australia doesn’t have the scale or market size compared to some of the multinationals, so it’s important for local manufacturers to continue to be innovative and respond quickly to challenges within the market. 

The importance and advantage of Australian-made has never been more apparent and I hope local manufacturers continue investing in skills, infrastructure, process and support systems like the SafetyCulture platform to improve safety, efficiency and innovation.”

Sam Schachna
CEO, Roma Food Products

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