From batch testing to environmental swabbing programs and a culture where ‘food safety is everyone’s business’, the team at Obela Australia is focused on protecting consumers while producing some of Australia’s most popular fresh dips and spreads.
Leading that commitment at Obela are Quality Assurance Manager Katrina Lelli and Quality Assurance Lead Kelsey Wood, two experienced food safety professionals who share a passion for high care food manufacturing, continuous improvement and building strong food safety culture across the South Australian business.
For Katrina, food safety has been a career spanning more than three decades across several high care food manufacturing sectors.
Katrina began working in malting before moving into smallgoods manufacturing and eventually joining Obela 10 years ago. Along the way, she worked across malting, laboratory operations, quality assurance and production management, experiences she says strengthened her understanding of manufacturing systems and risk management.
“Smallgoods and dairy are great learning environments for quality managers because they’re high care, ready-to-eat products,” Katrina said.
“At Obela, we’re a high care, ready-to-eat business with dairy ingredients and products that rely on pH control as a key food safety hurdle. There’s a huge focus on ingredient quality, testing and process control.”
Kelsey’s pathway into food safety began at Obela itself. While completing her food science degree, she undertook an internship at the company then took on roles in cheesemaking and ready-made meal production.
“I actually started at Obela in 2018 as an intern during university,” Kelsey said. “After graduating, I worked in cheese manufacturing and then at a ready-to-eat healthy meal manufacturer, where I helped build the food safety program and HACCP systems from scratch. When the opportunity came up to come back to Obela, it felt like a homecoming.”
Katrina said she immediately recognised Kelsey’s potential. “She already stood out when she was in her early twenties,” Katrina said. “She had great instincts, strong knowledge and a willingness to learn. Bringing her back to Obela meant we could apply the experience she’d gained in other high care food sectors into our own systems.”
Together, Katrina and Kelsey now help lead Obela’s food safety and quality systems across a workforce of around 95 people. At the centre of their approach is a simple philosophy: food safety belongs to everyone.
“That’s our core philosophy: food safety is everyone’s business,” Kelsey said. “No matter who you are in the business, whether you work in quality, communications, administration, cleaning or production, everybody has a role to play.”
That mindset has strengthened since Obela became fully owned by PepsiCo, which Katrina says has brought additional food safety expertise and systems into the business.
“They really walk the talk when it comes to food safety culture,” she said. “We already had a strong food safety culture, but being able to leverage PepsiCo’s knowledge, systems and people has taken that even further.”
For Kelsey, one of the biggest surprises was seeing how deeply food safety culture was embedded across the global business.
“It wasn’t just a slogan,” she said. “You could see senior leaders genuinely believed in it and lived it every day.”
Obela’s quality team consists of four people, and food safety responsibilities extend throughout the entire operation. Production teams undertake cleaning, pre-operational checks, critical control point monitoring and process documentation as part of daily operations.
“There’s a real sense of ownership,” Kelsey said. “People take pride in the condition they leave the facility in for the next shift.”
Supporting that culture are extensive testing and monitoring systems designed to proactively identify and prevent potential risks.
Katrina said Obela’s finished goods testing regime and environmental monitoring program were two of the company’s most important safeguards. “We have an extensive finished goods testing program and operate a positive release process,” she said.
The business also conducts extensive environmental swabbing throughout the facility, targeting areas such as drains, floors and difficult-to-clean locations.
“If we start seeing elevated micro activity in those areas, we investigate immediately and put preventative actions in place,” Katrina said. “That helps us stop issues before they become larger problems.”
Looking ahead, both leaders are focused on continuing to strengthen staff capability and food safety culture throughout the business.
Obela is expanding its internal food safety training programs and participating in initiatives such as World Food Safety Day in June, which they are extending for the entire month with staff activities, recognition programs and food safety awareness campaigns.
For Katrina and Kelsey, the future is about embedding food safety thinking into everyday decision-making across the organisation.
“Our goal is to continue to build a food safety mindset into daily life and enhance food safety culture day to day,” Katrina said.
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