Continuous improvement is at the heart of everything we do

At What’s Cooking?, we take great pride in our commitment to employee engagement, safety, quality, sustainability (ESG), efficiency, and to offering our customers excellent services. This is why continuous improvement is part and parcel of our strategy for operational excellence.

Employee engagement

Our employees are the backbone of our company, and we do our very best to ensure that they feel motivated to get to work every day. We foster a positive and inclusive work environment that encourages collaboration, creativity and continuous learning, with a key focus on communication and recognition, operator training and the leadership skills of our team leaders.

Safety is our top priority…

Safe working conditions are a top priority for What’s Cooking? We have intensified our safety training, paying special attention to employee behaviour and encouraging our employees to ‘SEE – SAY – STOP’ whenever they spot a potential hazard. While we, unfortunately, saw a 14% increase of accidents in 2022, the number of severe accidents sharply decreased by 20% in the same timeframe. Additionally, we continued to execute our bestin-class safety system, striving for a safety culture that everyone is on board with.

… as well as quality

Quality is at the core of everything we do. We are making good progress improving our quality system, which ensures that our products and facilities meet the highest standards. In the field of food safety and quality, our continued investments have allowed our factories to grow according to the requirements set by IFS, or the BRC quality standards (International Food Safety – British Retail Consortium). Implementing a food safety and quality culture, finally, requires an agile organisation that continuously adapts to the requirements of its customers. We have strengthened our processes in that department as well, partly by introducing several digital tools.

Sustainability is vital

The sustainability (ESG) of our operations is centred around two pillars: minimising our energy consumption (gas, electricity, water) and decreasing waste across the supply chain. We have multi-disciplinary teams spotting ways to reduce our environmental footprint and executing projects to make this happen.

Efficiency is key

Efficiency is key to our success as a company. Hence our implementation of several process improvements to streamline our operations. Having thoroughly invested in operator trainings, the introduction of a preventive maintenance system, and leadership trainings.

We will continue to invest in continuous improvement to enhance the performance of our factories, especially now that procurement, due to the war in Ukraine, is being challenged. The price of aluminium, plastic and cardboard packaging keeps rising, as do the price of tomatoes, wheat and meat-based raw materials, logistic costs and energy costs. Additionally, we are facing availability and supply problems. We have installed a multi-disciplinary value engineering program, ‘DRIVE’, to explore opportunities to create added value, and to cut costs while safeguarding the quality and innovative character of our products.

At your service

We want to offer our customers the best possible service, and we have seen a year of important improvements in our S&OP process (Sales & Operations). Focusing on the service and quality of our suppliers has become a pillar of the S&OP process as well. To ameliorate our demand forecasting and capacity planning, thereby supporting our S&OP process and service throughout the chain, we have kicked off a major IT project. Finally, we have continued our training of Green and Yellow Belts combined with the recruitment and training of Black Belts.

Continuous improvement is, and will always be, at the heart of our ambition to achieve and maintain operational excellence.

Eric Kamp Chief Operations Officer

Christophe Bolsius, SBU Director Ready Meals