Chr. Hansen office in South Africa now fully up and running

Strong regional knowledge and expertise

The South African office officially opened on 1 July 2022 with the support of a highly skilled technical sales team focused on customer excellence, and committed to contributing towards the growth of the leading global bioscience company across Southern Africa.

The Chr. Hansen South African team serves customers in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia, Madagascar, Mauritius, Botswana, Mozambique, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Angola.

Closer to the customers in Southern Africa

The opening of a commercial office in South Africa is a valuable addition to Chr. Hansen’s presence in the country and has successfully been executed as part of Chr. Hansen’s 2025 Strategy, aimed at delivering growth and cementing its position as a differentiated bioscience company with a focus on microbial and fermentation technology platforms. Chr. Hansen’s commitment to working closely with key markets, such as the Southern African market, is more important than ever as new trends emerge, and challenges arise in localized markets.

“With customer proximity and customer centricity as key motivators, the opening of the office in South Africa will enable us to commercialize and bring concepts to our customers faster. We made a commitment to invest more in expanding our presence in growth markets with a strong local, specialized technical and application support team,” says Jenny Lombard, General Manager of Chr. Hansen South Africa.

“Chr. Hansen has been operating in South Africa for the past 40 years through our distribution partner, AECI Food & Beverage,” adds Jenny. “The continued partnership between the local Chr. Hansen office and AECI Food & Beverage, which has an exceptional track record, ensures continued safe and reliable delivery performance, despite challenged supply chain conditions.”

Growth potentials

Sub-Saharan Africa is a diverse region with markets ranging from emerging to developed markets, and South Africa is by far the largest and most mature dairy market in the region.

“In addition to growing the dairy market, we aim to build on some of the recent successes we’ve had in using our cultures in non-dairy applications like Mageu, Ogi, Obushera and Kunu-Zaki,” says Jenny. “We will also be able to further leverage our local application center (LAC) based in Bellville, Cape Town to create concepts for our customers.”

“Being close to our customers is essential to succeed in building long-term and lasting customer relations and satisfaction, especially if you would like to better understand, experiment and co-create exactly what your customer needs,” Jenny explains. “With the rising costs and prices of ingredients, producers are also challenged to get more out of less. With Chr. Hansen now closer to our customers, we are able to leverage our solutions and technical expertise to support them in optimizing productivity and creating relevant concepts with much greater agility.”

Unique technical capabilities in South Africa

In addition to opening the office, Chr. Hansen South Africa has exclusive access to a dairy application center in Cape Town. The LAC opened in March 2019 as a joint venture between Chr. Hansen and AECI Food & Beverage to provide better technical support to our customers in Africa.

“In order to strengthen collaboration with our customers, we want to leverage our LAC to create interesting concepts for new product development and support them with recipe and process optimisation. We are also able to do milk antibiotic testing, residual lactose testing and microbiological screening in the center,” says Lara Walker, Regional Application Manager of Chr. Hansen South Africa.

The LAC is a fully equipped, small-scale, fresh-fermented dairy plant.  With specialized processing equipment, the Chr. Hansen South African team can also assist with shelf-life and accelerated shelf-life testing, rheological and viscosity measurements, and full sensory profiling of fermented products.