Every certified food business has a story about the day the auditor walked in. Richard Jackson, founder of SHEQ Consulting, is more interested in the other 364 days. Nearly eight years after starting his firm in Port Elizabeth, he has quietly built one of the continent’s most trusted food safety consultancy firms, working with organisations ranging from Coca-Cola to family-owned food processors, all without ever running a formal marketing campaign.
Here is what he has learned about why some African manufacturers thrive under scrutiny while others keep failing the same audit, year after year.
Introduction
There is a moment in almost every food safety audit that tells you everything about a business, and it has nothing to do with the certificate on the wall. It is the moment an auditor finds the same non-conformance they flagged twelve months earlier, still sitting there, unresolved, as if the previous audit never happened. Richard Jackson has seen that moment more times than he can count.
As Founder and Managing Director of SHEQ Consulting, Richard Jackson leads a food safety and quality management systems consultancy headquartered in Port Elizabeth, with additional offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
For close to eight years, he has helped food, pharmaceutical and packaging manufacturers across South Africa and neighbouring markets, including Botswana, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe, build systems that continue to perform long after the auditor leaves.
His firm works across the major global standards, including FSSC 22000, BRCGS, ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and HACCP based systems, and its client list ranges from multinational names to independently owned operations still finding their feet in a certification process that can feel overwhelming.
Trained in food science and technology, Jackson cut his teeth in the wine, dairy and meat industries before moving into consulting. It was there, watching systems that looked flawless on paper collapse under real production pressure, that the idea for SHEQ Consulting took shape: simplify complex international standards into practical systems that genuinely work on a live production floor, and share that knowledge generously across the industry rather than guarding it.
That grounding in real manufacturing, rather than theory alone, shapes almost everything he says about compliance today. For Jackson, a food safety system is only as good as its worst day, and building one that survives contact with reality is a very different discipline from building one that merely survives an audit.
What follows is a conversation about what is actually holding African food manufacturing back, what is changing fast, and why the businesses getting this right are starting to treat food safety as a genuine competitive edge rather than a cost of doing business.
The Interview
A gap that is closing, slowly
You’ve audited and consulted across South Africa, Central and East Africa, and internationally. How has the compliance landscape here actually changed?
Jackson does not dress up the comparison. Having worked across markets in Africa, the Asia Pacific region, Australia and New Zealand, he is in a rare position to say, honestly, where the continent still trails. And he does say it. But the story he tells next is one of real, measurable progress. Consumer awareness has grown sharply, and with it, the pressure on businesses to comply not because a regulation demands it, but because the person buying the product is paying closer attention than ever to who made
it and how. Requirements have matured in step. Ask Jackson to compare today’s food businesses with what he saw a decade and a half ago, and the answer is unequivocal.
“When I go back ten, fifteen years versus what businesses are doing now, it’s really commendable.”
The improvement, he is careful to add, does not mean the work is finished. What remains, in his view, is less about ticking the next box and more about a genuine shift in mindset: putting the customer, and by extension the consumer, at the centre of every decision a manufacturer makes. The focus, as he puts it, has to move from passing audits to consistently protecting the people who eat the product.
The real cost of cutting corners
What are the most common compliance challenges you see among manufacturers today?
Ask Jackson where things go wrong, and the first word out of his mouth is investment. Not a lack of it everywhere, but a mismatch between why businesses pursue certification and what certification actually requires of them. Too many companies chase the standard because it unlocks a lucrative retail contract, he says, without
committing to the ongoing investment, in people, in infrastructure, in training, that keeps the system alive between audits.
The pattern shows up clearly in his own audit findings: the same non-conformance surfacing audit after audit, or infrastructure gaps that sit untouched for years. Certification, he stresses, was never meant to be the finish line. What businesses in this position often do not grasp, until it is explained to them in terms they understand, is what that inaction is actually costing them.
“If it’s a repeated non-conformance, that’s a systematic breakdown, and these things might end up manifesting in a food safety recall, which could be a much bigger expense.”
That is a deliberate choice of language. Jackson has learned that talking about clauses and standards rarely moves a business owner. Talking about return on investment does. Frame the risk of inaction as brand damage, legal exposure and the cost of a recall, and suddenly compliance stops sounding like red tape and starts sounding like
risk management, which, in the end, is exactly what it is. Two very different businesses, two very different failure points
Where do companies typically fall short when preparing for audits or certification?
The honest answer, Jackson says, depends entirely on the size of the business. Smaller manufacturers tend to struggle with the basics: not enough training, not enough hands. It is common to find a single quality manager trying to run an entire management system while also covering shop floor duties that would normally be spread
across a small team.
Laboratory testing, essential for verifying that a product genuinely meets regulatory or customer specifications, is another pressure point. Faced with the cost, some smaller operators test at the bare legal minimum instead of at a frequency that actually matches their risk.
Bigger businesses have the resources. What they often lack is cohesion. Jackson describes organisations operating in silos, where the laboratory team understands the laboratory, procurement understands procurement, and nobody quite grasps that they are each other’s internal customers and suppliers, pulling in the same direction. The result is a business where deep pockets of food safety knowledge exist, but the culture never quite reaches every corner of the operation. Food safety, he insists, only succeeds when every department understands its own contribution to protecting the consumer.
“The knowledge gap between different departments sometimes is quite big.”
Why SHEQ treats every client as a partner, not a project
How does SHEQ Consulting help businesses close these gaps?
Jackson describes the firm’s approach less as a service and more as a working relationship. Every management system SHEQ Consulting builds is customised to the client’s specific operation, starting with an honest assessment of where the business actually sits, then developing or refining training around the exact competence
requirements of the relevant standard.
Beyond individual training, the firm runs food safety and quality culture programmes designed to align beliefs and behaviours across an entire business, not just the departments most exposed during an audit. Implementation, auditing, training, culture change and continuous improvement are treated as one long term partnership rather than a series of disconnected compliance projects.
What sets the firm apart, in Jackson’s telling, is that every consultant on the team is a qualified Lead Auditor. That means the practical experience gained conducting real certification audits feeds directly back into how clients are trained and coached, illustrated with genuine scenarios rather than textbook theory, always respecting client
confidentiality.
Internally, the team runs its own calibration workshops and regular information sharing sessions, a discipline aimed at making sure every client gets consistent, current guidance rather than one consultant’s personal interpretation of the standard.
A reputation built without a single ad
What results have your clients seen, and what would they say if someone called them today?
Jackson is matter-of-fact about the firm’s growth. It has expanded almost entirely through word of mouth, without a formal marketing function, serving clients ranging from Coca-Cola and Montego Pet Nutrition to considerably smaller, independently run operations. It is a detail worth sitting with in an industry crowded with consultants competing for attention. SHEQ Consulting has not needed to compete for it.
Rather than making sweeping claims about outcomes, Jackson points to something quieter and, arguably, more telling: the growth of the individuals his team works with over years of engagement, and the fact that clients keep returning and keep recommending the firm to others in the industry. In a sector where trust is the entire product,
that kind of organic reputation is difficult to manufacture and even harder to fake.
Beyond the food aisle
Food is your core focus, but you work in other industries too. Where else has this expertise travelled?
While food manufacturing and pharmaceuticals remain SHEQ Consulting’s centre of gravity, implementing standards like ISO 9001 for quality management and ISO 14001 for environmental management, Jackson describes project work that has taken the firm well outside conventional food industry territory. One recent
engagement involved implementing ISO 9001 for a carbon fertiliser technology company running industrial scale reactor systems.
Another, currently underway, is with an aviation parts supplier working toward the quality management requirements needed to operate as a qualified link between original equipment manufacturers and
private aircraft owners.
The common thread is not the sector. It is the underlying discipline of building a system that actually reflects how a business runs day to day, whatever it happens to produce.
What FSSC 22000 Version 7 means for certified sites
There has been a lot of noise around changes to the FSSC scheme. What should manufacturers actually know?
Jackson flags this as one of the more consequential shifts currently facing certified businesses. The most structurally significant change sits in the scheme’s prerequisite programmes. Where Version 6 relied on the ISO/TS 22002-x technical specifications, Version 7 moves to the newly published ISO 22002-x:2025 series, anchored by a new baseline standard, ISO 22002-100:2025, applied alongside sector specific parts.
Other changes worth watching, he says, include food fraud shifting from an additional requirement into a full prerequisite programme, more clearly defined food chain categories, sharper guidance on allergen management, particularly relevant for anyone in animal feed, and a strengthened requirement for a documented food loss and waste policy, something Jackson ties directly to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
“A lot of businesses, there’s food going through the back door to the pig farmer, yet our brothers and sisters are dying of hunger out there.”
Certified sites have a defined transition window to move to Version 7. Jackson’s advice is straightforward: treat it as a structured project, starting with a gap assessment against the new requirements, rather than something to scramble through close to the deadline.
The numbers behind the shift
Where do you see food safety and compliance heading across Africa in the coming years?
Jackson lets the numbers make part of the argument. South Africa had just over 1,000 FSSC 22000 certified sites roughly three years ago. Today that figure has grown to more than 1,500, and that is counting only one standard among several GFSI recognised schemes operating in the market, including BRCGS, SQF and IFS.
He connects that growth to a moment the industry has not forgotten: a listeriosis outbreak linked to contaminated product in South Africa a few years ago that claimed multiple lives, a stark, sobering reminder of what happens when a system fails where it matters most.
For Jackson, the trend he is watching is not just about rising certification numbers. It is a genuine shift in how businesses talk about compliance, moving away from framing it purely as a cost, and toward understanding food safety as a form of social responsibility that happens to be inseparable from good business.
The audit that actually matters
If a company wanted to strengthen its compliance system starting today, where should it begin?
Jackson’s answer comes without hesitation: the internal audit. A business’s true capability, he argues, shows far more clearly in how rigorously it examines itself than in how it performs on the one day an external auditor happens to be on site.
“The internal audit programme is the one that looks under the system in the eleven months that the
auditor is not there.”
His guidance is to treat internal findings with the same seriousness as external ones, running a genuine root cause investigation rather than closing issues out just to move on. Frequency should be risk based, not fixed on the calendar, tied to how critical a given process is, thermal processing, for example, or products destined for vulnerable consumers like young children or immunocompromised people, and shaped by what previous audits have revealed.
Once a year, in his view, simply is not enough for most operations. And a business that rarely raises its own non-conformances is not necessarily doing well. More often, it just is not looking closely enough.
The one thing Jackson wants the industry to understand
If there is one thing you would want the industry to take away about compliance and food safety, what would it be?
Jackson brings the conversation back to where it started: accountability that runs through an entire organisation, not just the departments closest to an audit.
“It’s everyone’s responsibility, from the shop floor worker to the senior manager sitting at the head office, and everyone within the supply chain, including service providers.”
The point, he adds, is not that businesses are doing this purely because someone external demands it. Protecting the consumer and protecting the business are, in his framing, the exact same objective, viewed from two different angles. Strong systems, he says, are built for everyday operations, not simply for passing audits.
Closing Reflection
What comes through most clearly in this conversation is not a checklist. It is a philosophy, hard won across nearly two decades in food production and consulting, that a food safety system earns its worth in the quiet months when nobody is checking, not on the one day someone is. That reframing carries real weight for African manufacturers navigating an increasingly demanding global market.
As certification becomes less a formality and more a genuine passport to retail shelves, export markets and long term customer trust, the businesses most exposed are not necessarily the ones with the fewest resources. They are the ones still treating compliance as a box to tick rather than infrastructure worth building properly, and worth building with the right partner.
For food manufacturers, exporters and quality leaders across the continent, that is the question worth carrying out of this conversation: is your system built to pass an audit, or built to work when nobody is watching at all?
For businesses ready to close the gap between the two, SHEQ Consulting has spent nearly eight years proving what that partnership can look like in practice.