Brewing giant, Guinness Nigeria Plc, has reaffirmed its commitment to continuously deliver quality products through application of the highest standards of good manufacturing practice.
This is against the backdrop of the N1 billion fine imposed on the company by the National Agency for Food Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) over alleged usage of expired raw materials in the company’s production lines.
Speaking during a media interactive session in Lagos, Director, Corporate Relations for Guinness Nigeria Plc, Sesan Sobowale who acknowledged the receipt of a letter from NAFDAC said, the NAFDAC enforcement team visited a rented off-site warehouse where raw materials are stored; explaining that the said raw materials store is not a production facility and that the quality of its products was never an issue.
He said, “NAFDAC insists that its authorisation is required before we can carry out the destruction of expired raw materials or indeed in the process of approval of new best before date by the manufacturers of these raw materials and we were in the process of engaging NAFDAC for clarifications and resolution of the issues before the private correspondence from NAFDAC to Guinness Nigeria was clandestinely passed to the media.”
Sobowale also said, prior to the day NAFDAC visited the warehouse, it had fumigated the place on October 25 to prevent rodents from entering the warehouse.
He said Guinness also got relevant papers from the Ado-Ode Local Government on disposal of expired raw materials.
Other papers presented, which were seen by Daily Times, included the certificate on pest control treatment from a company called AC Fumen International and the FSSC 2200 ISO certificate.
Also speaking, the Managing Director of Guinness Nigeria, Peter Ndegwa, said the company would not compromise on the highest standards of quality which were in line with globally accepted code of manufacturing practice.
Ndegwa said, Guinness will continue to maintain and improve the quality and efficiency that it has established in over 60 years of operations in Nigeria, adding that, the company consistently improves on the manufacturing process to “ensure that the quality of our products is top notch.”
Continuous improvement in quality, Ndegwa stated, will remain a constant pursuit by the company.
According to Ndegwa, “We take our responsibility to deliver quality products seriously. The meticulous and painstaking work, including rigorous quality assurance that precedes the final production of all our products, has a singular objective: to ensure that our consumers drink products that are healthy and comparable with similar products made by a Diageo facility anywhere else in the world.”
He said the company’s conformity to the highest standards of quality have enabled the repeated re-certification of its products and procedures by some of the world’s leading certification organizations as the International Standards Organization (ISO) as well as the National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and the Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON). The company received the ISO 9002:1994 quality standard in 2001 becoming the first brewery in West Africa to be so honoured.
Cephas Afebuameh, the Supply Chain Director for the company explained that there is an extensive and elaborate process by which basic raw materials are first converted during the brewing stage, with lots of critical control points, before the products are bottled and released to the market. “Each of these painstaking steps is rigorously monitored for conformity with all necessary global standards which we regard as basic, as we always aspire to exceed the much higher standards that have been set internally by the Diageo Group.”
The high quality of products from Guinness Nigeria’s breweries, he said, “has been attested to repeatedly not only by NAFDAC but also by the Standards Organization of Nigeria, as well as the internal quality controls of the Diageo Group.”
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