Company Report: Orley Foods (Pty) Ltd
Specialised confectionery solutions Orley Foods may be a leading supplier of specialist confectionery and chocolate ingredients to the food manufacturing industry, but Managing Director Andrew Janik insists that its employees are the key to success

Orley Foods, much like the confectionery ingredients it produces, has a colourful history. It was established in 1960 as Orley Chemicals, a manufacturer of glue for the shoe industry. Current Managing Director Andrew Janik explains that it is a family business and one that his uncle, Josef Janik and his partner Harry Myers, were extremely passionate about. Captain Janik was a pilot in the Polish squadrons during the Second World War, but also a "typical entrepreneur", according to Andrew.

Following a visit to the UK, Captain Janik returned home to South Africa with a licence to manufacture non-dairy cream and the recipe to begin production. "The product was very successful here, the volumes went up very quickly," Janik explains. "After a couple of months, they stopped manufacturing the other products and they switched to manufacturing Orley Whip."

In 1984, the company changed its name to Orley Foods. This was also the year in which the second generation took over the management of the company. "A lot of people ask us where the Orley name comes from; it is the loose translation from 'eagle' in Polish - it was always a symbol of strength and courage."

Despite its family history, Janik and his business partner Seymour Abrahams, after 25 years, took the initiative to sell a portion of their shares in the company to a firm that represents a BEE (black economic empowerment) capital equity fund, enabling Orley Foods to maintain its family values but with the necessary capital support.

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS
Today, the company develops and manufactures a range of ingredients for the catering, confectionery and baking industries, as well as products for limited retail distribution, including its trademark product, Orley Whip.

"Our main drive is our B2B model where we supply ingredients and technical solutions to other manufacturers," he explains. "Our motivation is to be a preferred supplier of innovative and specialised ingredient solutions to local and global food and beverage manufacturers.

"One of our success stories is changing the way that we look at our customers and how we are forging those strategic partnerships with them." This is where the company's partnership/relations management skills come into play, ensuring that various segments of the business are in close personal contact with its customers, because the danger is that as it becomes more electronically connected, it becomes less emotionally connected.

"It works very successfully for us because those relationships have been established over the years - they are lasting," adds Janik.

So has Orley Foods continued to invest, despite the economic meltdown? "What we're investing very heavily in is people and that's what I'm passionate about," he insists. "I've spent the last 18 months putting a management team together which takes personal responsibility for the success of the business. It cost me a lot of time, finding the right people. I can see the results straight away.

"The same applies to our new product development," Janik adds. "At the moment, we employ two food scientists and 14 food technologists."

New product development is one of Orley Foods' core competencies. Again, the calibre of its employees plays a crucial role in the R&D process. "We are investing in innovation here, but by selecting the right people and focusing them in the right direction. Through that, we are developing new products for our customers, but we are also providing them with solutions."

One of its most recent developments has been the manufacture of fruit cubes. Janik admits that while this product may not be innovative, having existed for many years, Orley Foods is working on new flavours and fruits that have previously not been made available.

"The new product development is one of the drivers of the business, to the extent that when we're looking at percentage of sales coming from new products on an annual basis - in previous years we were running at about 8-9 percent, last year we were at 12 percent - this year, we expect 15 percent of our products sold will be new products," he explains.

OPTIMISTIC OUTLOOK
The last two years has seen the company make several investments in new plants and machinery; but that's not to say it hasn't been impacted by the global downturn. "The crisis is affecting everybody. We've been affected by dropping a couple of percentage in volume sales this year," he says. By looking after its margins and handling cash flow, Orley Foods is already outperforming its own expectations.

"I'm looking very optimistically to this coming year," Janik reveals. "As you know, next year South Africa is hosting the World Cup, which is bringing a lot of activities to the country, so that is going to bring a higher volume in sales.

"But this year we are doing much better than we were anticipating. From a turnover point of view, last year we finished the year with R232 million and we're looking at R277 million turnover this year, which is about 20 percent growth."

As Janik attests, the company's success can be attributed in the main to its employees. "I believe, personally, that really what can bring a competitive advantage to the business is to develop people and develop leaders within the organisation," he adds. That's why Orley Foods provides adult-based education training (ABET) for its factory floor workers and offers learnerships.

"For our middle management, and the higher positioned people in the organisation, we're doing the leadership and management development programme via Stellenbosch University," Janik says.

Now, the focus is on the implementation of the 20 Keys System from Japan. "What is really fantastic about that is that it goes across the entire organisation," explains Janik. "It is a system to improve products and processes, improve the efficiency, integrating the managers and employees, which means we are moving away from this fragmented system."

Finally, to what does Janik attribute Orley Foods' continuing success to?: "One of the reasons for our success was always this entrepreneurial approach to everything; not by cutting corners but by being very responsive to our customers - I think we've always kept that in the back of our minds." Going forward, the company believes its customers must be taken on a journey with the "wow" factor. It wants to give them more value than they can expect from other food manufacturers.

He adds: "Business is not about the machines, it's about people."

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