SOUTH AFRICA –  Natural ingredient solutions supplier for the food industry  Chr. Hansen has fully operationalized its South African office in an effort to enhance service delivery to its customers in sub-Saharan Africa.

The office located in Southdowns Office Park, Irene, Gauteng was opened officially opened in July 2022 with a commitment to contribute towards the growth of the leading global bioscience company across Southern Africa.

With operations now fully up and running, Chr. Hansen plans to leverage its capabilities to serve customers in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia Malawi, Namibia, Madagascar, Mauritius, Botswana, Mozambique, Congo and Angola.

“With customer-proximity and customer-centricity as key motivators, the opening of the office in South Africa will enable us to commercialise and bring concepts to our customers faster,” says Jenny Lombard, General Manager of Chr. Hansen South Africa.

The office opening is also part of Chr. Hansen’s 2025 strategy in cementing its position as a differentiated bioscience company.

“We made a commitment to invest more in expanding our presence in growth markets with a strong local, specialised technical and application support team,” Jenny explained.

The location of the office was also strategic as Chr. Hansen has a strong focus on the dairy sector and South Africa is by far the largest and most mature dairy market in the region.

The company also aims to build on some of the recent successes they have had in using their cultures in non-dairy applications like Mageu, Ogi, Obushera and Kunu-Zaki in the south african market.

Jenny noted that with the rising costs and prices of ingredients, producers are also challenged to get more out of less.

“With Chr. Hansen now closer to our customers, we are able to leverage our solutions and technical expertise to support them in optimising productivity and creating relevant concepts with much greater agility,” she added.

To realize this goal, Chr. Hansen South Africa has exclusive access to a dairy application centre that is fully equipped, small-scale, fresh fermented dairy plant in Cape Town.

The application center was opened in March 2019 as a joint venture between Chr. Hansen and AECI Food & Beverage to provide better technical support to customers in Africa.

“In order to strengthen collaboration with our customers, we want to leverage our LAC to create interesting concepts for new product development and support them with recipe and process optimisation. says Lara Walker, Regional Application Manager of Chr. Hansen South Africa.

She further revealed that with LAC’s capability, Chr. Hansen South Africa was also capable to do milk antibiotic testing, residual lactose testing, and microbiological screening.

With specialized processing equipment, the Chr. Hansen South African team can also assist with shelf-life and accelerated shelf-life testing, rheological and viscosity measurements, and full sensory profiling of fermented products.

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