Page 24 - Food & Drink Magazine October 2019

PLANT DESIGN & FITOUT
Growth, innovation and expansion
When your company is the fastest growing branded supplier in the Australian grocery market, capital expenditure is somewhat unavoidable. Freedom Foods Group is a company on a mission. Kim Berry reports.
[Ingleburn in Sydney’s west], the Shepparton build, the nutritional build, and our head office rebuild at Taren Point.”
Key works that have been undertaken include the litre capacity upgrade at Shepparton and the completion of stage one of the transformational nutritionals capability.
The Ingleburn plant was commissioned at the beginning of the year. It is predominantly a non-dairy site processing alternate milks and stocks as well as its Australia’s Own brand ambient drinking yoghurt.
The site is 60,000 square metres with the building occupying 40,000 square metres, or 11 football fields.
OWNER BUILDER
Freedom Foods project manages and builds its facilities for cost and control reasons.
McDonald says it means the company can control the quality and the process of the build at the pace it wants to achieve.
“The project team is part of copmany’s internal engineering team. Subcontractors are then hired for the build,” he says.
The company has an engineering team that moves to whichever site is being upgraded or built.
“We move our resources around. Once we finished work at Shepparton the team moved to Ingleburn. It is a very lean
team, about six people, which reflects the company culture. There is a head engineer, a building supervisor and then engineers assisting who also run all the contractors.”
McDonald uses several systems to ensure the rapid pace set by the company is achievable and safe. Its hazardous operations review (haz-op) covers the safety scopes of plant equipment prior to installation.
“On a basic level, it is engaging our contractors, while for plant equipment we work with Tetra Pak, GEO and DS Triple.
“Then, in the last year, we’ve implemented a process called engineering management of change, EMOC. That picks up all the changes in structures and facilities that haz-op doesn’t,” McDonald says.
Sub-contractors go through a number of steps to show they have all the relevant insurance and other requirements depending on their job. They then have to complete Freedom Food’s induction process before allowed on site (see story on the company’s safety systems, p38).
The engineers oversee all the projects and once the installation is completed, the build moves into a commissioning phase. Part of that is an acceptance test to standards. And then a risk assessment according to the team, which covers the tasks from beginning to end.
FREEDOM Foods Group is on a mission. Continual growth, product innovation and building highly trusted brands are the foundations of its extraordinary performance.
In FY19 Freedom Foods revenue increased by 48.5 per cent – or $230.9 million of total sales – which was off the back of 45 per cent growth in FY18.
Its brands include Australia’s Own, MilkLab, Arnold’s Farm, Heritage Mill, Messy Monkeys and Vital Strength.
In the last three years the company has invested $430 million in capital expenditure.
And yet the FY19 earnings results did not fully benefit from the key capital expenditure initiative which began in March 2018, including new nutritionals
capabilities and a 500 million litre capacity expansion (from 250 million litres) at its Shepparton plant.
Group head safety and compliance Rob McDonald told Food & Drink Business: “We are a disrupter in the food industry and the supply chain. We are a quiet achiever, having come from very little over the last ten years”.
McDonald says it stems in part from CEO Rory Macleod’s pragmatic approach that “if you build the facilities and put in the infrastructure, then your capacity increases and your sales can go up”.
McDonald says: “I’ve been with the business for two-and- a-half years and in my current role I’ve been across all of the building projects. This build
24 | Food&Drink business | October 2019 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au