Case Study
Enhancing Safety & Efficiency at George Weston Foods with SoterAI
Trusted by HSE and site leaders across 50+ sites in Australia & New Zealand
Background
George Weston Foods Limited (GWF) is a leading Australia/New Zealand based business within a global food enterprise, a subsidiary of Associated British Foods (ABF), an international food manufacturing group with operations across multiple continents.
As one of Australia and New Zealand's largest food manufacturers, GWF employs more than 7,000 people across over 50 sites, manufacturing a diverse range of leading household food brands including:
- Bakery products: Tip Top, Burgen, Abbott's Bakery, Golden, Speedibake, and Dad's Pies
- Ham, bacon and smallgoods: DON and KR Castlemaine brands
- Bakers flours, yeast and grains: Mauri brand, as well as animal feed
- Dips, aioli and plant-based products: Yumi's
- Cleaning and hygiene solutions: Jasol
- Premium artisan baked goods: Noisette and Brasserie Bread
Guided by its values of Safe, Courageous, Trusting and Collaborative, GWF is deeply committed to safety for everyone, every day. This commitment is reflected in its ongoing focus on enhancing operational environments to protect employees, strengthen governance, and streamline processes in line with enterprise-wide standards.
The Challenge
Like many large-scale, geographically distributed manufacturing organisations, George Weston Foods faces inherent challenges in maintaining operational efficiency while ensuring a proactive and consistent approach to workplace safety across its Australian and New Zealand operations.
The scale, geographic spread and complexity of its facilities, with multiple production lines and constant movement, create ongoing operational and safety risks that require strong governance and real-time visibility.
GWF sought a solution that would empower its health and safety community and site leadership teams to proactively address site-level safety challenges, prevent incidents, and generate actionable insights. The objective was to leverage data-driven intelligence to continuously improve safety outcomes while strengthening overall operational effectiveness in line with enterprise expectations.
The Solution: A Strategic Partnership with SoterAI
To address these challenges, GWF selected SoterAI's innovative platform. Implementation was a collaborative effort, with a focus on demonstrating the solution's value via integration into work practices and routines to give confidence and ensure minimal disruption, using a phased 'light touch' and supported rollout.
Key components of the SoterAI solution leveraged to date include:
Proactive Compliance Monitoring
Assesses organizational compliance against external regulations and standards (e.g. Safe Work Australia) and internal controls, highlighting non-conformances that allow GWF to validate and then make any appropriate changes.
Smart Content Generation
Drafting, adapting, and summarizing toolbox talks, safe work procedures, ergonomic reports, policies, and training content tailored to the needs of specific business units.
Hazard Detection
Via image and video data, identifying unsafe lifting, spill risks, equipment guarding issues and more.
AI-Driven Comms & Change Enablement
On-demand guidance providing intelligent answers to user questions about policies, legislative obligations, standards and incident procedures, complemented by outputs to support communication and training.
Risk Intelligence
Via the expeditious completion of risk identification and assessment, whether manually by GWF or auto suggested by SoterAI.
It is worth noting that GWF uses SoterAI to assist their staff in making decisions, rather than simply relying on SoterAI, remaining very much human led. In 2026, GWF intends to further expand and develop the AI competence of its HSE and site leadership teams, and using SoterAI is pivotal to these plans.
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User Testimonials
"For the new Mauri flour mill in Ballarat Victoria, SoterAI enabled efficient completion of over 420 plant and equipment risk assessments, covering both HSE and Food Safety compliance. Leveraging the document analysis and IQ centre, I rapidly reviewed complex equipment manuals and standards, creating robust desktop risk assessments - a task that would typically span many weeks into months, was completed in a quarter of the time."
"This freed resources for in-person reviews and to build an auditable risk register for consultation. Feedback from other sites confirmed minimal changes were needed, validating both the output quality and SoterAI's effectiveness as a compliance tool at scale."
Linda
HSE Lead - Mauri, GWF
"SoterAI has significantly enhanced my effectiveness as a HSE Manager. By leveraging SoterAI, I can quickly analyse injury statistics, identify trends in unstructured data, and generate practical control recommendations, initiatives, and training materials - tasks that previously required days, now completed in just 30 minutes."
"SoterAI was instrumental in developing management training packages, especially around new psychosocial legislation in Victoria. I was able to prepare a comprehensive presentation for senior leaders in minutes, a process that would otherwise demand hours of research and manual preparation, now I can simply validate what SoterAI tells me."
"Overall, SoterAI enables me to dedicate more time to strategic initiatives and on-the-floor engagement, driving stronger safety outcomes and delivering greater value."
Cassandra
HSE Manager - Yumi's, GWF
"SoterAI has evolved from a helpful tool into core infrastructure for managing HSE and compliance. I use it daily to analyse incident data, test risk controls, and review policies—work that once took hours of manual effort."
"Previously, compiling and analysing data in Excel took three to six hours; with SoterAI, it's about an hour, including validation. It also transforms rough concepts into audit-ready procedures, toolbox talks, and communications with consistent, compliance-focused language."
"We've centralised job dictionaries in Soter and linked them to medical assessments and capacity reviews, enabling evidence-based job matching. What once took a full day per review now takes 10 minutes."
"By combining document analysis, data insights, and job-to-capacity matching in one platform, SoterAI streamlines workflows, strengthens decision defensibility, and frees time for what matters most: engaging with people and proactively reducing risk."
Anna
HSE Manager - DON, GWF
Business Impact
The implementation of the SoterAI platform has yielded strong results for George Weston Foods, already demonstrating a clear return on investment. Users were surveyed regardless of their level of experience with SoterAI, noting that more than a third of respondents have less than one month access and experience using SoterAI.
"Since we were introduced to SoterAI we keep getting more and more impressed with how SoterAI can help our HS&E professionals, as well as our Line Managers spend more time on the value adding aspects of their roles, and less time on the drier, but none the less important desk-top work."
"We have fostered a culture of controlled experimentation with the use of SoterAI and this has allowed us to have more and more tasks undertaken using Soter. We have used a 'trust but verify' approach, not blindly following what any AI tool tells us, and what we have found is that the validity, reliability and flexibility of the tool have far outweighed our expectations."
"The return on our investment (ROI) plays out in a number of ways. We are more confident that our policies, procedures and other compliance documents are in good order. The time we get back from this task being less time intensive means our practitioners spend more time 'on the floor' with our workers consulting and listening to how to make the workplace safer, and less on the 'paperwork'. Finally, we can produce better curated and better laid out documentation that means a more coherent body of work in terms of safety documentation that our audience, the frontline team members find easier to ingest. This means they have a greater understanding and this in turn helps keep them safer."
Andrew Scarlett
Safety Transformation Director Group, George Weston Foods
Conclusion
The partnership between George Weston Foods Limited and SoterAI serves as a powerful testament to the transformative potential of AI in modern manufacturing.
By embracing a proactive, data-driven approach to safety and efficiency, GWF further strengthens its commitment to ensuring a more secure and safe workplace, solidifying its position as an industry leader committed to innovation and its people.
"We're very proud of our partnership with George Weston Foods and of how SoterAI elevates existing safety effort into actionable, organization-wide intelligence. It's been a pleasure for everyone at Soter to work with their wider team."
Matthew Hart
Founder, Soter
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