Against the backdrop of the reported sanction on Guinness Nigeria Plc by the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, the company has reaffirmed its commitment to continuously deliver quality products through application of the highest standards of good manufacturing practice.

The managing director Guinness Nigeria Plc, , Mr. Peter Ndegwa noted that the over-riding objective of the company is to avail customers of world-class products and value for money.

Speaking during a media interactive session in Lagos over the weekend, Ndegwa said Guinness will continue to maintain and improve the quality and efficiency that it has established in over 60 years of operations in Nigeria.

He stated that the company consistently improves on the manufacturing process to “ensure that the quality of our products is top-notch.”
Ndegwa said continuous improvement in quality will remain a  constant pursuit by the company$

“We take our responsibility to deliver quality products seriously. The meticulous and painstaking work, including rigorous quality assurance that precedes the final production of all our products, has a singular objective: to ensure that our consumers drink products that are healthy and comparable with similar products made by a Diageo facility anywhere else in the world”, Ndegwa said.

Guinness boss maintained that the company’s conformity to the highest standards of quality have enabled the repeated re-certification of its products and procedures by some of the world’s leading certification organisations as the International Standards Organisation (ISO) as well as the National Agency for Food and Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and the Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON).

Ndegwa reaffirmed that Guinness Nigeria is very positive that on account of its ongoing engagement with NAFDAC, the issues will be clarified and resolved in a short while.

He noted that the company received the ISO 9002:1994 quality standard in 2001 becoming the first brewery in West Africa to be so honoured.

L-R  Managing Director/ Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Peter Ndegwa, Corporate Relations Director, Mr. Sesan Sobowale, Supply Chain Director, Mr. Cephas Afebuameh and Marketing and Innovation Director, Mr. Gavin Pike, all of Guinness Nigeria during a media parley which held at the Ikeja brewery of Guinness Nigeria over the weekend

Also speaking, corporate relations director, Sesan Sobowale acknowledged the receipt of a letter from NAFDAC.

He said the alleged infractions relate to a rented off-site warehouse where raw materials are stored.
Sobowale explained that the said raw materials store is not a production facility and  that the quality of its products was never an issue.

“NAFDAC insists that its authorisation is required before we can carry out the destruction of expired raw materials or indeed in the process of approval of new best before date by the manufacturers of these raw materials and we were in the process of engaging NAFDAC for clarifications and resolution of the issues before the private correspondence from NAFDAC to Guinness Nigeria was clandestinely passed to the media”, Sobowale stressed.

The supply chain director of the company, Cephas Afebuameh explained further that there is an extensive and elaborate process by which basic raw materials are first converted during the brewing stage, with lots of critical control points, before the products are bottled and released to the market.

He said: “Each of these painstaking steps is rigorously monitored for conformity with all necessary global standards which we regard as basic, as we always aspire to exceed the much higher standards that have been set internally by the Diageo Group.”