Helping a Beverage Brand to Ensure Quality Compliance with an AIB Certified Warehouse

As the 3PL provider in the Southeast for a premium sports drink company, Sunland Logistics Solutions’ team provided scalable warehousing and packaging solutions for the beverage company helping them to successfully scale and grow its brand. After being acquired by a multi-national beverage corporation, the team managing the sports drink brand needed to comply with the new quality standards required and ensure warehouses throughout its network were AIB Certified.

AIB International is an organization that provides certification to ensure food safety and quality through comprehensive audits and inspections of facilities.

The multi-national beverage corporation’s requirement for this certification is driven from the business need to demonstrate its commitment to high food safety and quality standards. AIB certification helps ensure regulatory compliance, reduces the risk of contamination and recalls, and promotes operational excellence through best practices in pest management, cleaning, and maintenance.

This certification enhances their reputation by showing it meets rigorous safety, cleanliness criteria, and ultimately helps maintain customer trust.

The southeast distribution operation was in a class B building that required facility modifications, floor to ceiling cleaning, process documentation, and training to comply with AIB standards. This all needed to be accomplished in a 4-month timeframe (while normally this process would take 12 months) and relocating the operation to a new facility would be cost prohibitive and disruptive.

With new quality requirements for warehouses to be AIB certified, the sports drink brand needed its 3PL warehouse providers to invest in making both facility and process improvements within a short timeframe.

As a nimble 3PL partner committed to the success of its customers, Sunland Logistics Solutions responded quickly by allocating the resources and assembling a team of its project management and quality experts to ensure the warehouse operation and facility earned its AIB certification within the expedited timeline required.

For Sunland to get the warehouse in Greenville, SC AIB certified, the project was divided into various work streams. The key steps involved were aligned with each of the categories scored during an AIB audit process, including:

Operational Methods and Personnel Practices: Ensure safe receipt, storage, handling, and processing of raw materials. Implement proper food handling and processing protocols to prevent contamination.

Maintenance for Food Safety: Design, upkeep, and manage equipment, buildings, and grounds to maintain a clean and efficient environment. This helps avoid food safety and sanitation issues.

Cleaning Practices: Properly clean and sanitize equipment, utensils, and buildings to maintain a safe environment. This includes guidelines for cleaning methods, the use of chemicals, and frequency.

Integrated Pest Management: Monitor, assess, and manage pest activity to prevent conditions that could support pests in a food environment. Emphasize prevention strategies to avoid pest contamination.

Adequacy of Prerequisite and Food Safety Programs: Ensure all departments work together through proper management, training, documentation, and teamwork to deliver food safety. Formalize, coordinate, and consistently apply food safety programs across the facility.

A project was formed to lead each of these work streams and a cross-functional team was leveraged with representatives from various departments including Finance, People & Culture, and Engineering. The Sunland team worked together like a well-oiled machine consistently delivering on their commitments and helping other team members with their assignments.