The Director-General, National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, has urged business owners to seek ways of sustaining brand loyalty by increasingly building quality into their products.
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She made the appeal in a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) by the Country General Manager, Nigerian Bottling Company Ltd.(NBC) Mr Matthieu Seguin in Lagos on Friday.
Adeyeye was represented by the Director, Food Safety and Nutrition, NAFDAC, Mr Sherif Olagunju, during NBC’s 2020 Stakeholders Forum themed ‘Product Quality and Integrity: Challenges and Opportunities’, held virtually on Tuesday.
The NAFDAC boss said: “To survive in severe competition, brand loyalty is a powerful tool and there can be no loyalty without product quality and consumer satisfaction.”
She commended NBC for its conscious self-regulation and internal audit, noting that this explained why consumers trusted the company’s products.
Seguin said that a survey conducted by NBC earlier in the year showed that product quality and integrity ranked highest among the demands of the company’s stakeholders, hence the decision to continue prioritising it.
“Our commitment to quality and integrity is from production to delivery. Everyone at NBC works hard to procure the finest ingredient, equipment and services from some of the industry’s most respected suppliers.
“We also complement this with our state of the art local production and distribution system,” the country manager said.
He added that the NBC achieved the highest product quality and integrity through compliance with local and international standards, certification of its systems, auditing and regular feedback from customers.
“We keep the line of communication open to our consumers for regular feedback which we get a lot and this also guarantees the prompt resolution of complaints they may have.
“As the world evolves and consumers’ preferences change, we believe in continuous improvement of our system,” Seguin said.
He, however, reiterated NBC’s commitment to product quality and integrity, pledging that this would remain the standard of its operations.
Seguin explained that quality remained the hallmark of the operations of the Coke System.
“At NBC, we understand that only products and services valued and accepted by our customers and consumers will deliver help to our business growth.
“We are committed to driving our business forward by continually improving quality control across the organisation, working together with Coca-Cola Nigeria, local authorities, partners, suppliers, customers and consumers,” he said.
Also speaking, Zoltan Syposs, the Vice President, Quality, Safety and Environment, the Coca-Cola Company said that the Coca-Cola System comprising Coca-Cola and NBC was vigilant about product quality and integrity.
Syposs noted that research had shown that about 200 different types of diseases were spread through contaminated foods and beverages, with about 420,000 deaths recorded annually from contaminated foods, 125, 000 of them among children under the age of five.
He said that the Coca-Cola system was building a total beverage company and that it would continue to maintain the highest product quality to further earn consumers’ trust.
In his presentation, Mr Babatunde Irukera, Chief Executive Officer, Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), stressed the importance of product quality and integrity, noting that it helped in sustaining brand loyalty.
Irukera said that the most basic obligations of manufacturers to consumers were to provide clarity of information, legitimacy of both direct and indirect claims, consistency of product delivery and consumer satisfaction derived from product usage.