Bee Maid Honey Limited Receives SAFE Work Certification by Made Safe

Bee Maid Honey Limited Receives SAFE Work Certification by Made Safe

Posted on June 8, 2021

Made Safe, the manufacturing sector partner for SAFE Work Manitoba, works with its members to assess their readiness, provide support, and help companies achieve certification.  Modeled on internationally-recognized best practices, our process has demonstrated positive outcomes for individual companies and the industry overall.  Certified manufacturers have safer and healthier workplaces, better control of workplace hazards, fewer injuries and illnesses, more engaged and productive employees, and a significant rebate on their WCB premiums.

Our goal to is highlight manufacturers who are leading the way in broadening their development.  We hope that by sharing their stories and the barriers they faced during the certification process, we can help pave a path for other manufacturers looking to expand their business.

 

About Bee Maid Honey Limited

Bee Maid Honey Limited is owned by more than 300 Western Canadian Beekeepers who take care of the honeybees and harvest their pure delicious honey. We’re committed to providing the finest honey in every bottle we package to be enjoyed in households across the country and beyond. We’ve been doing it that way since the inception of our Co-ops in the 1930s and the formation of Bee Maid Honey Limited in 1954, ensuring consistent quality year after year, bottle after bottle.

 Q: Tell us a little more about your company, the number of staff you employ, the markets you serve and the products you make:

Honey is our primary focus, and we service the retail, private label, food service, and industrial markets.  We pack our members’ honey at our two facilities in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Spruce Grove, Alberta.  We also have three Bee Supplies Outlets selling Bee Supplies and a variety of honey related products in Winnipeg, MB, Tisdale, SK, and Spruce Grove, AB.  We employ 122 people across all our facilities.

Our primary focus is domestic, and we sell our products in a number of channels across Canada.  We also sell Internationally into the United States, Japan, Korea and the Caribbean to name a few.

Q: What should readers of this blog post know about your company vision and culture? 

One of Bee Maid’s Vision statements is to be a high performing, efficient and responsible organization. We also have a stated value to strive to be leaders in food and employee safety.  Our Mission, Vision and Values (read more here) drives us in everything we do.

Working on our Made Safe Certification helps us achieve our vision and aligns strongly with our value to be a leader in employee safety.  Furthermore, we recognize strongly that you will never build a successful culture of continuous improvement without caring about the team’s safety first and foremost.

Q: What kind of hurdles did you expect to face before making the commitment to certification? How would you recommend overcoming those hurdles?

 Uncertainty whether our safety program was robust enough to obtain certification.

Even though we did well on our GAP audit, meeting the certification threshold felt like quite the challenge. We tackled the opportunities for improvement one by one, yet still did not finish them all prior to our certification audit. We simply scheduled our audit and worked to make it the best we could.

We were scared to fail, which is natural. We need to train ourselves to focus on the positive. In this case, focus on the outcome (a safer workplace for our team) and not your fears (failing an audit).

Q: Did you learn any safety or business lessons throughout the process that might help others make the decision to become certified?

 Made Safe wants you to be successful and is there to help guide you along the path to a safer workplace.

Q: What would you say is the biggest benefit of certification so far (or that you can see on the horizon)?

The pride our team has in themselves to challenge themselves to a goal and achieve it.