Roma Food Products

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.