How to prepare and dress for a visit to a candy factory? If you find yourself in such a situation, you don’t need to worry about these questions. The hosts will take care of everything. I only recommend that if it is summer and you are wearing sandals, you bring a pair of cotton socks with you. Not because it is cold in the plant, but so that you don’t have to wear nylon shoe covers on bare feet.
For every food manufacturer in this world, the worst nightmare is that something will happen during the production process, causing a customer somewhere in a store to encounter a health-unsafe product. Or, God forbid, a product that is dangerous to health. And when you are the largest food company in the world, you must have absolutely the most rigorous standards and rules for allowing guests into the factory. I recently had the opportunity to personally verify this at Nestle’s factory in Sofia , where since 2005, KitKat chocolate bars have been produced for 35 markets worldwide, and, for the past six months, colorful Smarties candies as well.
The Sustainability Mantra
Petar Stoilov, the General Director of Nestle Bulgaria, is extremely proud of ‘his’ modern factory, which produces about 18,500 tons of sweets annually for the market. He is particularly proud of its contribution to fulfilling Nestle’s ‘Net Zero Roadmap’, which aims for the world’s largest food company to achieve a net zero environmental impact by 2050. Sustainability is, in fact, one of Nestle’s mantras in business.
The plan is to reduce CO2 emissions by 20 percent (compared to 2018) by 2025 through business adaptation, portfolio transformation, and waste reduction, to halve them by 2030, and to completely eliminate them in the next twenty years. For example, through the transformation of the business, the factory in Sofia has completely switched to using renewable energy sources and has managed to reduce water consumption by 67 percent. They believe that this year they can reduce water consumption by an additional four percent. Through portfolio transformation, specifically the gradual transition to paper packaging, PET packaging consumption has already been reduced by 50 tons per year, and savings on cardboard packaging have reduced cardboard consumption by nearly 200 tons.
By 2025, no KitKat packaging will be in PET packaging. Only recyclable paper. Smarties have been packaged in paper for two years. To repay the planet for the increase in paper consumption, Nestle will plant 20 million trees each year.
To enter the facilities where these sweets are produced, you must first undergo a short course on how to behave inside: follow the guide; do not approach the belts and machines; always hold onto the handrails on the stairs… This last point is so serious that the factory director will personally warn anyone who thinks they can walk up the stairs however they want to hold onto the handrail. Then comes the dressing: a protective cap that is not just a cap but also a cover for the neck and shoulders, and it must be well tucked under the work coat; large ear protectors help keep the protective cap in place; men with beards receive additional face protection; women who have ignored the previously sent warning that skirts are not allowed in the factory will have to put on work pants; those with painted nails must wear gloves; work shoes are mandatory, and those without their own socks will receive nylon shoe covers instead.
Only after you are thoroughly equipped and visitors look like Teletubbies can you proceed to the standard disinfection procedure before entering the facility. A completely new coat is passed through a roller for collecting (non-existent) particles. Shoes are treated on a special device, and hands are covered with so much soap that rinsing takes a good minute under a strong stream of water (there’s where more water can be saved!).
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Such procedures are common in every factory where food is produced (and in many other productions), but at Nestle they have taken it a step further. When you exit the facility where KitKat is produced, and before you enter the Smarties production facility, you receive a new coat. This is to ensure that nothing is accidentally transferred from one facility to another that could not even be brought into it. And again, a roller for collecting particles, shoe cleaning, hand disinfection… Oh my!
The Vegan KitKat is Coming
But safety is another Nestle mantra. They do not want to allow even the slightest mistake that could bring their products into the media under the headline ‘recalled from the market due to health unsafety’. There is also the mantra about healthier products, which will soon bring a vegan KitKat to the Croatian market. If you are uneducated (like me) and immediately wonder what the difference is between a ‘regular’ and a vegan chocolate bar, the answer lies in the dairy component. The vegan chocolate bar will not contain milk of animal origin but rather plant-based milk.
Although Croatia is certainly not a country with a large number of vegans, the vegan KitKat may contribute to the growth of Nestle’s confectionery product sales in our market. In this category, Nestle is, in fact, ‘thinnest’ in Croatia. As Laurentiu-Florin Dimitriu, the General Director of Nestle for Croatia, BiH, and Slovenia, states, the company achieved sales worth 40 million Swiss francs in Croatia last year.
By far the best result in Croatia is achieved with instant coffee, a category in which it holds the first position in our market with a 44.4 percent market share. It is also in first place with cereals, holding a 19.9 percent share. It holds second place with baby food (26.1 percent share) and pet food (18 percent share). In industrial food (soups, mayonnaise…), it holds third place with an 11.9 percent share, and with confectionery products, it is only in fourth place (5.2 percent share).
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The production lines from which two of Nestle’s probably most famous candy brands come down in the Sofia factory are similar to production lines in other confectionery factories. On one side, ingredients enter the kettles, and on the other side, finished products come out. In the meantime, at each of the numerous stages of production, workers along the line closely monitor what is happening on the line and remove pieces that are not flawless. There are not many of those; certainly, there are far fewer than I have seen in similar facilities in similar factories, but they do exist and end up in the bin next to the line.
A Tragic Moment of Realization
For me personally, this was a tragic moment in the Sofia factory. In every candy factory I have ever visited, visitors were allowed, and in some places even encouraged, to take whatever they liked from those bins and eat it. Since my favorite ingredient of KitKat is the wafer, I was drooling when I spotted a bin with slightly damaged wafers. But – no! They won’t let you! It’s not that they wouldn’t let me eat a wafer, but eating is strictly prohibited in the facility.
And I was just wondering how it is that Bulgarian workers in the candy factory are so thin.
