Blazing New Trails in Quality and Food Safety

Christine Knezevich, Environmental, Health, Safety, Quality and Food Safety team manager, discusses sugar sample with lab technician John Smith, Jr.

In an earlier century, Christine Knezevich’s trailblazing great-grandmother wore trousers and worked on the railroads in Pennsylvania. In this century, Knezevich is blazing trails of her own as she helps lay down safety initiatives at Imperial Sugar Company’s state-of-the-art Port Wentworth refinery.

As the Environmental, Health, Safety, Quality and Food Safety team manager, Knezevich is at the center of a matrix of responsibilities. Reducing the accident rate, ensuring that customers have a safe product, interfacing with regulatory agencies, launching sustainability efforts — all fall within her purview.

“The questions I try to answer are … How can we make our facilities even safer? How do we protect the environment? How is the regulatory environment changing? How can we distinguish ourselves in our customers’ minds? What value-added services can we offer them?” she says. “In a competitive marketplace, these sorts of initiatives are crucial.”

Lab Technician Charles Davis keeps track of sugar testing.

One way she has brought value to customers, for example, has been to pursue voluntary food-safety certifications for Port Wentworth. In December, the refinery earned Safe Quality Food (SQF) Level 2 certification, which Knezevich says is of significant value to customers, especially in an era of heightened consumer concerns over food safety. By the end of this year, she hopes to have achieved SQF Level 3 certification — the highest available.

“It guarantees a certain quality level to our customers, as well as demonstrating the measures that we take toward protecting the safety of our sugar,” she says. “That’s very important to our customers, especially large customers, like Walmart and Kroger.”