Sourcing

A Worldwide Quest for Flavour!

For a half-century, spice experts from our parent Company McCormick have travelled the world in search of the best spices and herbs available. More recently, this commitment to purchase directly from source countries has intensified resulting in the formation of the McCormick Global Sourcing Ingredients Organisation. Responsibilities of this group include spice buying and vendor certification.

Our goal is to find the highest quality spices and herbs available. Our spice buying team has a combined total of more than 100 years experience in the spice trade and is an industry leader in knowledge and best practices. The team scours over 40 countries, some in the farthest corners of the world, to track down the highest quality products. Our Spice Commodity Managers regularly travel overseas to countries of origin to analyse the overall supply and demand situation and gain valuable information affecting crops, including weather conditions, farmers’ interest, as well as economic and political changes.

 

Our Sourcing Programme

Our Global Sourcing programme encourages our supplier base to create strong partnerships with farmers. We ask our suppliers to stress the need for producing high value products and to educate farmers on better ways to manage the harvest, storage and integrity of their products. In return, farmers fulfil the suppliers’ demand for high-quality raw materials.

Over the years we have established reliable supply lines in countries of origin. We have created joint ventures in India and Indonesia, developed key strategic alliances in other major spice growing countries and generated a network of over 150 suppliers. Our joint ventures and strategic alliances provide year-round work for more than 1,000 employees, offering fair wages, medical assistance and advancement opportunities.

McCormick prides itself on working in direct relation with developing countries in order to cultivate exceptional suppliers with strong ties to the farming community. We realize this is a long process that requires patience and perseverance but feel the results are well worth the effort. For example, in the late 1960s we encouraged farmers in Uganda to grow high-quality vanilla beans as a new and better source of income. A few years after our efforts began, dictator Idi Amin stopped the farming activity. After the dictator’s demise, McCormick went back into Uganda to help the local farmers revive the vanilla business. Today it is a robust enterprise employing hundreds of local farmers and producing exceptional vanilla.

 

Quality from Source

McCormick must also meet the consumer’s end-requirements of food safety. To do this we have to understand and manage all phases of production, from cultivation to post-harvest and storage practices.

To support our efforts in product quality control in source countries, we established a vendor certification management program. This team focuses on product handling and cleaning processes to ensure uncontaminated/undamaged, safe end-products. Attention is primarily focused on our joint ventures and strategic alliances. Each is audited and evaluated annually following company-wide guidelines. Any infractions are identified, and a corrective plan of action is launched for prompt follow-up. This process ensures that our key vendors use current techniques to eliminate any harmful contaminants such as allergens, foreign matter or microbiological pathogens.