Frucor Beverages Recognised as a ‘Best Employer’

Media Release

30 May 2011

Frucor Beverages Recognised as a ‘Best Employer’

Frucor Beverages Australia and Frucor Beverages New Zealand have respectively been recognised as an Aon Hewitt Best Employers. New Zealand CEO Carl Bergstrom and Australia CEO Jonathan Moss have accepted the awards at a ceremony in Sydney.

Frucor was one of only two New Zealand organisations awarded Best Employer status by Aon Hewitt this year, and one of only nine organisations in Australia. This is a huge achievement for Frucor to have both the Australian and New Zealand businesses independently achieve this accreditation in the same year.

One hundred and thirty organisations across New Zealand and Australia participated in the rigorous accreditation programme which involved three stages – an employee opinion survey, a people practices inventory, and an organisational audit.

Carl Bergstrom has been CEO of Frucor’s New Zealand business for the last 11 years, and officially takes over his new role as Frucor’s Group Managing Director this week, replacing Mark Cowsill who is retiring after 18 years in the role.

Like Mark before him, Carl is passionate about the benefits employee engagement can bring to customers and the bottom line. “We are committed to growing our people, in order to grow the business. Our aim is to be a true values-based organisation, and this is built on a strong business rationale. Our customers’ view of Frucor is a result of their interactions with our people and our products. If our people are engaged and passionate about what they do, our customers see it and it becomes a point of difference, he said.

“We haven’t stopped investing in our people, even during the challenging times. Every one of our 820 employees has experienced our leadership development programme in some way or another,” he said.

“Each year we add new challenges or evolve the programme to keep moving forward, and meet the future needs of the business. This year we have introduced a concept called ‘White Space,’ where we equip and support our managers to take their teams away from their everyday responsibilities for two days, in order to create change and challenge the way we do things. So we don’t just say we are innovative or trailblazing, we show we are prepared to take risks, and actively work with our employees to help them operate this way.

“We have also worked hard to be transparent and explicit about our vision for the business. We talk about not only the goal, but also what we are doing to get there. We have been actively focussing on and measuring employee engagement since 2002. Two years ago we stated our goal to achieve Best Employer status by 2012, and it’s great to have got there a year early – the challenge is now to sustain this, and to keep improving.”
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About Frucor: www.frucor.com

Since its beginnings in the early 1960’s as part of the New Zealand Apple & Pear Board, Frucor has evolved from a small local juice business to a significant international beverages company, with 820 staff and annual revenue of NZ$500 million. Frucor exports approximately NZ$250 million of beverages a year, roughly equivalent to a quarter of New Zealand’s total annual wine industry exports.

Frucor is the market leader in energy drinks in Australia and New Zealand, and the market leader in juice in New Zealand.

Frucor manufactures, markets and distributes a range of fruit juices, fruit drinks, energy drinks, waters and soft drinks, many of which are household names throughout New Zealand and Australia. Energy drink ‘V’ is also distributed throughout Europe and the UK. Frucor brands include ‘V’, Mizone, H2Go, Just Juice, Fresh-up, McCoy, Citrus Tree, Simply Squeezed, Arano, , NZ Natural, G-Force, Supplement Water, Moccona, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, 7Up and Frank.

Since 2009 Frucor has been wholly owned by leading Japanese beverage and food company Suntory Group www.suntory.com

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