Kraft is well known as a company that pours their heart into creating foods that are wholesome, delicious and loved by people worldwide; it’s a company that’s always been there with the brands that people know and trust. So when it comes to something as inseparable from Kraft’s products as packaging is, the supplier of that packaging needs to be just as dedicated. For Kraft, one such packaging supplier is Nampak Flexible, whose take on packaging reads much like Kraft’s own position on foods. This is because Nampak Flexible is a company that pours their heart into creating the very best packaging solutions, ones that their customers know and trust too.
Being the World’s second largest food company, Kraft’s list of iconic brands is a long one, and as Africa’s largest flexible packaging manufacturer, Nampak Flexible’s role in helping maintain the reputation of many of these brands is crucial. Currently Nampak Flexible supplies packaging for a range of Kraft’s leading brands, including the Chappies wrappers, Royal Baking Powder sachets, laminated bags for the Endearmints and Manhattans range, as well as moulded and count line wrappers for Lunch Bar, Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate, Perk and P.S. chocolate bars to mention but a few.
In getting consumers’ favourite brands ‘out there’, both Kraft and Nampak Flexible do not underestimate the value of their longstanding partnership and its advantage when it comes to ongoing innovation, building on past successes and developing better products for the future; and because both food and packing supplier are on the same playing field, the results are always impressive.
As a pivotal starting point, and of the highest importance to Kraft are the safety and quality of the company’s products – as are the trust and confidence of Kraft’s consumers and customers. As such, Nampak Flexible must meet all of the right certifications and accreditations - an area where the packaging supplier has not failed to deliver.
Amongst the company’s many certifications, Nampak Flexible is a ISO 14001 - one of the highest international environmental management standards - HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points, [Status]), AIB (American Institute of Bakers, [Status]) and BRC (British Retail Consortium, [Status]) certified supplier. This means that Kraft receives and subsequently delivers products with the highest quality packaging. This Allows Kraft to maintain its own unwavering quality, environment and production process controls.
Recently, Nampak Flexible also became the first South African company to gain Oliver Wight Class A accreditation for Integrated Business Planning (IBP, [Status]). IBP can be described as advanced sales and operations planning (S&OP, [Status]), allowing Nampak Flexible to plan and manage their entire organisation over a 24 month horizon or more, aligning the strategic and tactical plans each month, and allocating critical resources - people, equipment, inventory, materials, time and money - to satisfy customers in the most efficient manner. The end result is significant reduction in inventory levels, faster lead times and ultimately closer partnerships with clients, which in turn reflects on Kraft’s own very high standards of delivery down the line.
Ongoing innovation between the two companies has also seen numerous innovative products successfully hit the market, including the likes of the Lunch Bar ‘Laduma’ limited edition World Cup 2010 promotion and the re-launch of the Bournville chocolate range. More recently the two partners put their heads together and introduced a water based adhesive in 2010, as well as embarked on another new product launch in May of this year which has seen the popular Perk chocolate product take supermarket shelves by storm. Prior to the launch of Perk, Nampak Flexible supported the machine commissioning and plant trials.

Another outstanding example of the excellent partnership between Kraft and Nampak Flexible is the local manufacture of the new Halls stick pack – a previously wholly imported product. With Nampak Flexible upping their capability to print, apply heat seal, hot melt and varnish in one pass – a process which has been extremely difficult for competitors to emulate – the Halls stick pack no longer needs to be imported. This achievement brings with it enormous supply chain benefits such as increased speed of the Halls product to local markets.
What the relationship between Kraft and Nampak Flexible ultimately proves is that quality and innovation are a result of working very closely together, with the overriding goal being that of maintaining the heritage and reputation of those brands that are such favourites amongst consumers
Back to top ^