CAQA Orchard Lane Foods
CAQA Orchard Lane Foods manufactures fruit based snacks, chilled juices and ambient sauces at its Dandenong South plant, bread and sweet bakery lines at its Shepparton bakery, and over the counter tablets and capsules for contract customers at its licensed pharmaceutical site in Western Sydney. The business supplies national supermarket private labels, food service distributors, pharmacy wholesalers and its own Orchard Lane retail range. Customers buy from Orchard Lane because every batch can be traced from raw material receipt to dispatch, every critical control point has a record, and the pharmaceutical site holds a current licence to manufacture under the Australian code of good manufacturing practice.
The business runs three sites and six departments. Dandenong South operates two production shifts from Monday to Saturday with a night hygiene crew, and houses the head office, the quality laboratory and the main warehouse. The Shepparton bakery runs a continuous three shift roster because bread does not wait, with a weekly maintenance window on Sunday. The Western Sydney pharmaceutical site works a single extended day shift inside controlled rooms with gowning, pressure cascades and environmental monitoring, and no product moves between the food and pharmaceutical sites. Each site has a site manager, a quality lead and a health and safety representative.
Quality and food safety are managed through a HACCP based food safety program at the food sites and a pharmaceutical quality system at the Western Sydney site. Critical control points are monitored and verified every shift, allergens are managed through segregation, validated changeovers and label checks, and every non-conformance is recorded with a corrective and preventive action. Suppliers are approved and audited, the mock recall is exercised twice a year, and internal audits run to a published schedule. Health and safety is managed under the Victorian and New South Wales work health and safety laws with a strong focus on machine guarding, manual handling, chemicals and slips in wet areas.