CJCheiljednag's Food Business Division began with sugar manufacturing and has continued to contribute to improving people’s everyday diets in Korea. Over the years, the company has steadily expanded its business portfolio with brands such as Dashida, Hetbahn and Bibigo, growing into a comprehensive food company.
CJ CheilJedang aims to go beyond its position as Korea’s No. 1 food company by offering healthier and more convenient food products to customers. The company is also committed to promoting the excellence of Korean cuisine around the world, while developing new K-Food products that combine local food cultures with Korean culinary traditions. Through these efforts, CJ CheilJedang aims to become one of the world’s top five food companies by 2030.
In addition, the company proactively prevents and systematically manages quality and safety risks that may arise across the entire value chain, from research and development to production, distribution and sales. CJ CheilJedang has established its own global quality and safety management system, CJ Global QMS, which exceeds HACCP and GFSI requirements. Based on this system, the company is building a consistent quality and safety management framework across all of its operations worldwide.
BRCGS Food Safety Culture Excellence Program
The BRCGS Food Safety Culture Exellence Programis a data-driven methodology designed to quantitatively assess and objectively analyze an organization’s food safety culture. Developed by integrating elements of psychology, food safety, quality, and health and safety management, the program is built on 20 years of research and development in collaboration with industry, academia, and government bodies. Today, it has become a globally recognized program, used by approximately 12,000 organizations across 90 countries and in around 70 languages. It helps organizations assess the maturity of their food safety culture and identify key risks, enabling them to establish clear priorities and directions for improvement.
Background
CJ CheilJedang had already established training, inspection, and management standards to support food safety and quality. However, the company recognized that food safety cannot be achieved through standards and procedures alone; it becomes truly sustainable only when those standards are translated into actual behaviors on the ground.
In particular, recent changes in production environments, the expansion of diverse working patterns, and the operational characteristics of different sites have made it increasingly clear that a system focused solely on procedures and compliance may have limitations. As a result, the company saw the need to assess food safety more systematically from the perspective of “Culture” encompassing employee awareness, leadership messaging, and on-site execution rather than viewing it simply as a matter of regulatory compliance.
The BRCGS Food Safety Culture Excellence Program was therefore meaningful for the customer because it not only enables these elements to be assessed quantitatively, but also allows the company to objectively understand its current position through comparison with global benchmarks. Most importantly, the results can be translated into practical improvement activities that support meaningful change.
Process
The first priority was to ensure that the survey would not end as a simple questionnaire exercise. Before conducting the survey, the company communicated closely with the relevant teams to explain the purpose of the program, how the results would be used, and that the process was intended not as a simple evaluation, but as a foundation for practical improvement.
Rather than applying the survey questions as they were, the customer also refined some of the wording and interpretation so that employees on site could clearly understand and respond to them. This was based on the view that the reliability of the survey would be strengthened when employees could relate the questions to their own roles and day-to-day work, rather than perceiving them as abstract concepts.
After the survey was conducted, the results were not analyzed merely as scores. Instead, the analysis focused on the characteristics, strengths, and areas for improvement of each organization, as well as where gaps emerged between awareness and actual execution. Based on these findings, the results were translated into practical improvement actions that could be implemented in daily operations, including on-site communication, leadership, execution habits, human error prevention, and the systematization of existing activities.
[Photo by LRQAㅣRay Jin BRCGS North Asia(Left), Kang Min-Soo, CJ Cheiljednag (Middle), Lee il-Hyoung LRQA Korea General Manager(Right)
Plan for Sustainabile Food Safety
The most significant change the company hopes to achieve is for food safety to become a shared value practiced by all employees, rather than a management activity led by specific departments. At the site level, the goal is to move beyond simply following instructions and toward a culture where employees understand and recognize the importance of food safety, and voluntarily translate that awareness into action.
Moving forward, the company plans to continue implementing organization-specific improvement actions based on the survey results. It will also strengthen the connection between leadership involvement, site-focused communication, and the reinforcement of positive behaviors. Rather than treating the assessment as a one-time exercise, the company will continue to monitor and improve progress through repeated feedback and review, ensuring that meaningful change is being embedded in day-to-day operations.
Ultimately, the company’s goal is to establish food safety as a core organizational value practiced by all employees, and to embed it naturally into everyday work and decision-making.
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