Product quality and product safety

Glass offers numerous advantages as a packaging for food and beverages. One of the most appreciated features of glass packaging is that it does not impair the taste of food and beverages. Unlike other packaging materials, glass not only keeps food free of foreign odours and flavours, but also prevents the migration of potentially harmful chemicals into the beverage or foodstuff. The molecular structure of glass makes it impermeable to air and moisture, thus extending the shelf life of the food and reducing food waste. In terms of quality and safety, the downside for the consumer is the risk of breakage. The central tool we use to ensure the quality and safety of our products in keeping with our Strategy 2030 is our operational quality management system, which also helps us to increase productivity and reduce costs.

Quality and safety – everyone is responsible

We aim to improve our processes comprehensively and continuously; our top priority in this regard is to ensure product quality and safety. Responsibility for improving quality is assigned to our management team, and this objective is put into practice in our daily work with the support of the entire workforce. In connection with our strategic Leader in quality focus, the cross-divisional specialist group for technical performance, technology and quality has particular responsibility for guaranteeing product quality. Several in-house specialist groups work on projects to ensure quality at various Vetropack sites.

Certifications and audits

Standardised and certified processes help us to guarantee the high quality and safety of our glass packaging. All our plants are therefore certified to the ISO 9001 quality management standard, with the exception of our Boffalora plant which was commissioned during the reporting year. Certification of the Boffalora facility is scheduled for 2024.

The quality – and, therefore, the safety – of our products are guaranteed by end-to-end monitoring and control in our production. 100 percent of our glass containers are inspected so as to guarantee consistently high quality and safety, and to comply with all statutory and customer-specific requirements.

We use quality indicators as the basis for measuring progress: these include the numbers of complaints per million units sold, and the numbers of critical defects identified in-house. For competitive reasons, these key quality indicators are not published.

Our plants undergo audits to verify our standardised processes. Risk-based internal audits are conducted every year. External audits are carried out for certification (or recertification) purposes. Audits by our customers also help us to identify potential for improvements.

Systematic processes guarantee quality and safety

Our Quality and Food Safety Policy provides a Group-wide framework that offers instructions on ensuring maximum product quality while minimising any and all risks that could jeopardise consumers’ health. This policy defines Group-wide requirements for our manufacturing processes and for methodical hazard analysis according to the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) system, and it helps us to continuously improve our processes.

Sensor locates hazard points

Glass offers many advantages as a packaging material: it is pollutant-free, it can be recycled, and it provides excellent protection for its contents. However, glass has one disadvantage that cannot be overlooked: it can break or splinter. This presents a dilemma for filling plant operators in the food and beverage industry: they have to decide whether to reduce the filling speed and protect the containers but reduce the filling rate by doing so. We support our customers with selecting appropriate filling speeds to prevent any danger to the glass containers, without the need to accept compromises on the filling rate. To achieve this, a sensor provides extremely accurate measurements of the forces and loads that act on the glass containers during filling. For this purpose, Vetropack produces exact replicas of the glass containers to be tested for customers, and we perform the relevant load tests with the sensor.

Vetropack repairs its own mould sets to ensure highest quality

Our employees themselves repair the mould sets in all our plants. In this way, we ensure uniform quality throughout the Group and reduce our costs at the same time.

Guidelines, policies, supervisory and control instruments

• Standardised production and quality assurance processes
• ISO 9001 certification (except for Boffalora)
• Internal and external audits conducted
• Food Contact Material Safety Concept
• Quality and Food Safety Policy
• Compliance Monitoring Policy
• Hazard analyses in accordance with the HACCP system

Progress and events in the reporting year

Contribution to achieving the SDGs

Glass has many properties that can contribute to more sustainable consumption. One of the quality characteristics of glass packaging is its impermeability to air and moisture. Thanks to this attribute, many foods and beverages packaged in glass have longer shelf lives than products in other types of packaging, so food waste is reduced. Guaranteeing the highest quality and safety standards is essential so we can offer our customers the positive properties of glass to their fullest extent.

Performance indicators

GRI 416-2 Incidents of non-compliance concerning the health and safety impacts of products and services

In 2023, Vetropack received 8 critical complaints. In this context, critical means that these products posed a potential risk to the health and safety of consumers. However, the affected products were identified and separated so that no products had to be recalled.