Controlling risks
At the Safety & Environmental Assurance Centre (SEAC), our job is to provide Unilever with the skills, advice and guidance needed to reduce, manage and control any safety risks for consumers, employees and the environment.
SEAC operates from our central location in Unilever Colworth UK and the Corporate Centres in the UK and Netherlands. We employ leading experts across an incredible range of disciplines, from Chemistry and Environmental Science to Mathematics and Microbiology. Many of them interact with policy makers, regulators and other authorities - contributing to the development of safety legislation, for example. Together, our experts have established SEAC’s world-class reputation for risk assessment.
Equally impressive is the scope of the operation. Our teams involve themselves in every Unilever product, across every Unilever market and in every Unilever site worldwide.
There is also a great deal of responsibility. Before a new product is launched we work with product developers and brand managers to ensure that our new innovations are safe.
For example, a new functional food with blood pressure lowering properties has been developed under the Flora pro.activ brand. We led a programme of safety tests demonstrating that the active ingredient, a dairy peptide, is safe for all consumers.
Our employees are just as important. We assess the safety risks associated with our operations worldwide, focusing on continuous improvement and sharing good practice.
On the environmental front, meanwhile, we are acutely aware of the impact that products and manufacturing processes may have on the world around us. Our goal, then, is to reduce the environmental footprint from the manufacture, use and disposal of our products. Every year data is collected and analysed from over 350 manufacturing sites around the world on key measures of our environmental performance. This is then used to inform our continuous improvement programme.
If we had to sum SEAC up in a single word, it would be this one. Confidence. For over 40 years, everything we’ve done revolves around helping Unilever gain the confidence of consumers and communities around the world. For the next 40, our goal will be exactly the same.
