Nigeria: SON Presents Guinness Food Safety Certification

Source from:  Leadership (Abuja) 18 December 2007 12/19/2007

Leading brewing company, Guinness Nigeria Plc, has been formally presented the ISO 2000-2005 certification by the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) for satisfying food safety standards. To give emphasis to the occasion and to encourage other manufacturers to embrace quality benchmarks, Dr John Akanya, SON's director general personally presented the award to Keith Taylor, Guinness Nigeria managing director. The event, which held recently at the company's Lagos brewery, Ogba, was attended by senior officials of SON, members of the Association of Food, Beverage and Tobacco Employers (AFBTE), members of NAFDAC, and the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) and other key stakeholders on food safety, journalists and Guinness employees. Taylor, while receiving the award, remarked that the occasion would be the third time the company would be celebrating great and timeless accomplishments on standards certified by the apex regulatory body on standards. Not quite long, the company crossed another threshold in environmental quality when SON presented it with the ISO EMS 14001 certification. The EMS (Environmental Management System) is a structured approach to addressing the environmental bottomline, and ISO 14001 is the world's most recognised EMS framework as it helps organisations to manage better both the impact of their activities on the environment and to demonstrate sound environmental management. Only recently, two premium brands on the company's stable, Smirnoff Ice and Gordon's Spark, were awarded the Mandatory Conformity Assessment Programme (MANCAP) certification by SON for satisfying all standardisation and quality assessments carried out on them by the regulatory body. Enditem