As fast-moving consumer goods manufacturer Tiger Brands continues to advance a bakery restoration initiative it launched in March this year, the company has identified the Western Cape as a key growth region to increase the current 20% market share of its Albany bread brand.

Nationally, Tiger Brands sells 1.3-million loaves of bread a week from nine bakeries across the country.

The bakery restoration initiative has been focused on recovering volumes in the inland region, reducing stock-keeping unit complexity, optimising depots, benchmarking bakeries, managing revenue better, delivering consistent quality and reducing overheads and other cost management efforts.

The company has also managed to improve margin leakage management and use science- and intelligence-based approaches to pricing and marketing, to ensure a more targeted strategy on pricing, sales and profits.

Some of Tiger Brands’ key focus areas for the 2025 financial year across its bakeries include filling critical roles, ensuring stable relationships between management and labour, building more technical skills capacity and a diverse talent base, continuing wellness programmes and making Tiger Brands a good place of work, instilling its corporate values and enhancing communication forums.

Tiger Brands ultimately aims to have Albany become South Africa’s most loved bread brand by being the lowest per unit cost producer, delivering superior quality with a relentless focus on efficiencies to drive sustainable and profitable growth for stakeholders – powered by a highly skilled team.

The company’s operational improvements across its bakeries have also allowed it to make more positive impacts within the communities that it operates, with various programmes having benefited schools, old age homes and food distribution organisations.

Tiger Brands corporate affairs and sustainability chief Mary-Jane Morifi points out that the group’s support to communities has improved access to nutritious food and people’s ability to be self-sustaining with food gardens.

Additionally, Tiger Brands has helped communities advance infrastructure builds and reduce food and plastic waste.

Apart from its bakery optimisation drive, Tiger Brands has been advancing a groupwide optimisation effort over the last year. Tiger Brands group CEO Tjaart Kruger tells Engineering News that the group has made big changes to its operational management structure and streamlined its business divisions, which has allowed the group to offer more affordable products more widely.

CASE IN POINT

The Bellville bakery, in Cape Town, where Tiger Brands hosted an in-depth media tour on October 17, was commissioned in 2017 at a cost of R350-million.

The plant has the capacity to produce 12 000 loaves an hour on two baking lines, with its current utilisation rate being 7 500 loaves an hour, or 60% of capacity.

Bakery manager Sandra Pillay explains that the three-hour baking process at the plant starts with trucks unloading flour into silos, as well as yeast into condition tanks, with the mixing process thereafter involving the addition of water at the right temperature and ratio.  

After mixing, the dough is divided to reach a baked weight of 700 g and rounded before resting, moulding and rising. The loaves are baked for 22 minutes before being cooled, sliced, bagged, coded and crated.

The plant services more than 3 000 outlets with a distribution footprint across the Northern Cape, Western Cape, Eastern Cape and the Overberg region.

The bakery recorded an increase in production from 64-million loaves in the 2017 financial year to 80-million loaves by the 2023 financial year. In the first half of the 2024 financial year, the bakery produced more than 38-million loaves.

Notably, the bakery has improved on the number of consumer complaints per million units between 2017 and 2024, having started at a rate of 4.65 and having reduced it to 1.96.

BRAND GROWTH

The company’s Albany brand positioning of being more “real” and relevant to consumers and their daily lives is helping to drive growth in the Western Cape, particularly as bread forms a staple of many local cuisines in the region. 

Albany’s previous brand positioning focused on curated perfection, happy families and picture-perfect meals; however, in response to changing consumer attitudes and circumstances, Albany started to shift its focus to real people in real situations.

“Albany’s brand positioning is about authenticity. We celebrate the single mom, the everyday South African worker and young people – those that may not have a picture-perfect life but who can always rely on Albany to provide for their families with wholesome and delicious meals,” concludes Tiger Brands marketing director Lorraine de Graaff.