Few grocery items feel as South African as a bottle of Mrs Ball's, and after 13 years the chutney is heading back to where it started. Tiger Brands has just finished a R200 million upgrade of its century-old culinary site in Paarl, in the Western Cape, and used Monday's official opening to bring Mrs Ball's production back in-house. The brand was first launched in Woodstock, Cape Town, in 1917, and for the past 13 years it had been packed by a third party in Johannesburg.
Back where the raw materials are "We've brought the Mrs back to where she was born, to the Western Cape," CEO Tjaart Kruger told News24 after the launch, pointing out that the raw materials all come from Western Cape farmers. The revamped site, in operation since 1903, now runs three dedicated production plants and includes a vinegar plant that can make three million litres a year, a key input for Mrs Ball's Chutney, All Gold Tomato Sauce and Cross & Blackwell Mayonnaise. It has added 90 new jobs and turns out around 40 products, from All Gold jams to Colman's Mustard. Tiger Brands says it is also the first food producer to bottle jams in recyclable PET containers, so most shoppers no longer have to decant the jam into another container after buying it.
The cheaper-groceries play For Kruger, the spend is less about nostalgia than price tags. "We stated two years ago that the biggest issue we've had in Tiger is that we've got the best products that we can get, but we're too expensive," he said. Bringing production in-house is part of the fix: Kruger said the group was no longer keen on outsourcing because it makes quality and safety hard to control, and the upgraded plant lets Tiger Brands make its Mrs Ball's, All Gold, Colman's and Hugo's products cheaper for consumers. The Paarl site is the first of the company's structural investments to go live under a bigger push: Tiger Brands is spending about R1.5 billion a year on capital projects over the next three years, peaking above R2 billion, with a R1 billion Pretoria "super bakery" due in 2027.
With a 59,000m² site that Kruger says still has "lots of space", the question now is how many more of Tiger's brands eventually find their way home to Paarl.
