Life Lessons with Campbell Mitchell

Campbell Mitchell’s 30 years of international food safety knowledge and experience have given him opportunities to implement and improve quality and food safety management systems around the world.

Growing up, Mitchell’s family jumped from country to country, experiencing the world from different perspectives while his father worked in the oil industry at Shell.

“We moved to Singapore when I was 5, then to Brunei in Borneo, then Houston, Texas, and then to Holland,” Mitchell said. “I went to boarding school in Scotland; then my parents moved to Nigeria and Japan, so I have been all over the world.”

Now the newly appointed head of food safety and compliance for Kraft-Heinz, Mitchell’s entry into the industry started with a strong passion for microbiology.

Moving to New Zealand to earn his bachelor’s degree in microbiology from the University of Otago and a graduate degree in business administration from Massey University, Mitchell was introduced to food safety.

“Food safety is in my blood, but microbiology is my passion,” he said. “You need to put yourself in the mind of the microbe and know your enemy very well.”

Mitchell’s first food safety job was for a company that exported chilled lamb overseas. He spent his days swabbing the packing room and plating in the lab. But his time there was cut short, leaving him with an important lesson learned.

“That company went bankrupt because the CEO was found guilty of fraud from taking loans from overseas as revenue,” Mitchell said. “That taught me an important lesson: If you don’t have people that can say ‘no’ to the top leaders, then you may have a problem.”

Since then, Mitchell has worked on quality assurance projects across Australasia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and India at companies such as Fonterra, Nestlé, McCain Foods and Tiger Brands. Most recently, he served as vice president of quality and food safety at Fairlife, an ultra-filtered milk brand distributed by The Coca-Cola Company.

Mitchell sat down with QA to reflect on his food safety career and his hopes for the future as he expands into his new role at Kraft-Heinz:

I started doing some life writing, examining pros and cons of different lifestyles. I was always jealous of the kids that grew up in the same hometown, went to the same school and stayed in the same town, but they were jealous of me for traveling all over the place. When I was about 10 years old, I realized the only thing that was familiar to me was the back of my hands.

You’ve got to be able to be agile and experience new things. I don’t hold on to things so much, and they’re more objects rather than sentimental.

With Nestlé, I reported to the head of quality globally in Switzerland, and they had a lot of global standards. I never learned as much as I did when I was working for Nestlé. The factory manager had a budget of 2% of their turnover they needed to spend on food quality and safety, so a lot of that went into training, which I thought was a great investment.

Tiger Brands had 44 facilities in Africa, and they’re the leading brand in every aisle of the supermarket. A lot of companies fall into the trap of trying to be the best at everything and not doing it very well. In food safety, you have to be an expert on the product that you’re making, especially at the corporate level.

If you want to implement sustainability, you ask your consumers and stakeholders the most significant issues to them, and you plot them on a scale against the most important thing that's going to have the biggest impact on your company (a materiality matrix). And the most significant issue is always food safety. That also leads into food waste and shelf life, a lot of things people don’t think about.

If you’re in food, the most expensive thing that can happen to you is a product recall, and it’s hard sometimes to put that into a dollar amount for investing in food safety. Everybody in the world is the same; everyone wants to be successful and do their best. They just need to the tools and knowledge to get there.

I’ve recently taken on a new role as head of food safety and compliance for Kraft-Heinz in North America, looking after 31 facilities that represent the majority of the company’s global business. It’s a big step, and one I’m genuinely excited about. My focus will be on strengthening our food safety culture, tightening up compliance systems and making sure we’re consistently meeting the highest standards across the board.

This role brings together so many of the experiences I’ve had throughout my career, and I’m looking forward to working with some great teams to help raise the bar even further.