Bel Vietnam

CEO's Message

Bel is a family Group characterized by open, trusting, human relations. This way of operating has been handed down from generation to generation.

As far as our company is concerned, we see it as a human adventure. We believe that this is a place where everything is possible and people feel free to think outside the box. We believe in a glass half-full, curiosity and seeking new heights to conquer. We also believe in the virtues of being proactive to confront the many current challenges we face.

By emphasizing these energies, Bel offers its associates unique career opportunities, thanks in particular to the diversity of our business lines and international scope, which allow everyone to pursue professional development and fulfillment. 

Bel Group

Founded in 1865, Bel is an international family company whose leadership is built on a unique industrial and manufacturing expertise: cheese portions. Iconic brands - including La Vache quirit (Phô mai Con Bò Cười), Kiri, Mini Babybel, Leerdammer, and Boursin - sold on every continent. The engagement of our employees and innovation are some of our strengths to help us become the most innovative and responsible dairy player. 

Over 150 years, The Bel brands bring a healthy and good-natured pleasure to more than 400 million consumers worldwide. Our brands are all a source of pleasure. The recipes, taste and consumption patterns vary from country to country, to satisfy the expectations of consumers. Being present on the 5 continents via 33 subsidiaries and 30 production sites, product distributed over 130 nations, more than 12,000 employees with a rich portfolio of 30 brands, we are serving 20 billion cheese portions per year to worldwide consumers while maintaining a strong emotional connection with the latter, tinged with good humor and always synonymous with a smile.

Bel Vietnam

Present in Vietnam for over 65 years, The Bel Group leads the country’s cheese market, with The Laughing Cow (Phô mai Con Bò Cười), known as Con Bò Cười in Vietnamese, holding an extraordinary 85% market share. The Group’s long history in the country and the fondness of Vietnamese families for The Laughing Cow (Phô mai Con bò cười) brand has enabled Bel to anchor its presence durably in Vietnam, with the establishment of a sales subsidiary in Ho Chi Minh City in 2008, followed by a first test-production site in 2010. Supplying +5000 tons cheese every year with many favorites, iconic brands such as The Laughing Cow (Phô mai Con Bò Cười), Belcube, Cheez Dippers, Mini Babybel and Kiri, Bel Vietnam is committed to giving our consumers the opportunity to reconcile eating pleasure and nutrition with food cravings and needs. This commitment is translated into our mission statement: sharing smiles through unique experiences of dairy goodness.

Bel Vietnam’s new factory in Binh Duong is recently built in 2016 with the most advanced technology and world standard. Building on the success of the initial local production test and with capacity can be up to 10,000 tons/year, this new factory is set first as the production hub to supply for the local market and secondly a product research & development center to support the acceleration of The Group’s development strategy in Southeast Asia. At Bel factory, food safety and quality are prerequisites to meet the same food safety and quality demands defined by Bel and comply with recognized international standards and benchmarks, such as ISO 22002-1, FSSC 22000, BRC, HACCP, and IFS. We are applying “The Bel Manufacturing model” in which economic performance to optimize our productivity and environmental performance to ensure that we continue to grow sustainably. Since 2015, we have been designing the plant of the future in partnership with CEA Tech, the French Atomic Energy Commission research center to reduce product wastage, energy, and water consumption. Our ultimate ambition is to understand how to leverage disruptive innovation to develop our products of tomorrow, and to achieve that objective within an environment that cares about the resources we use.

BRANDS BLEND PLEASURE, QUALITY AND SUSTAINABILITY

Bel brands deliver fun healthy snack portions to over 400 million consumers worldwide. We have won and maintain the trust of families all around the world by continuously reinventing ourselves. Our brands are, above all, a source of pleasure. The recipes, taste and the way Bel cheeses are eaten vary from one country to another to meet local consumer expectations. Available on five continents, we have forged strong heartfelt consumer bonds, sprinkled with cheerfulness and always synonymous with smiles.

________La Vache qui rit or The Laughing Cow (Phô mai Con Bò Cười) – Over 90 years old and always smiling________

Whether it's called Con bo cuoi in Vietnam, La Vache qui rit always brings the smile and pleasure of its consumers. More than 90 years after its birth, Bel's founding brand has lost nothing of its vitality. The Laughing Cow (Phô mai Con Bò Cười) was born in 1921 in the Léon Bel factory in France. For consumers, it is a revolution: the first cheese is melted in serving, and can be easily transported thanks to its unique aluminum packaging. Success came very quickly when the round box set out to conquer the foreigner, strong of its unctuous taste and avant-garde communication. It invites consumers to discover the history of the famous cow and the values of conviviality, humor and innovation that characterize it. Today the product is present in 136 countries and has become the leading brand & household cheese brand in Vietnam market and for local consumers, accounting for more than 70% of market share. Although universal, the brand is listening to the specific needs of its consumers, with recipes are tailored to meet local demand. For Vietnam market, The laughing cow (Phô mai Con Bò Cười) offers various flavors including Traditional, Roasted Chicken, Crap, Less Fat and Selection which can satisfy every preferable taste of consumers. Rich in Vitamin D, B12 and Calcium, the product is sought to help boost the development of bone & teeth structure as well as brain activities which are particularly beneficial for children and teenagers.

The Laughing Cow (Phô mai ConBò Cười) around the Globe 

_______________________________Kiri - The mythic little square with the childhood taste_______________________________

The first cheese crafted specifically for children, Kiri holds a special place in the lives of budding gourmets. Kiri is something discovered in childhood and often loved long afterwards.

Prior to 1966, nobody had thought about crafting a cheese specifically for a child’s pallet and lifestyle. But that was before Kiri burst out of Bel’s plants in France’s Sarthe region to instant success. Practical and delicious, the little square servings of Kiri found their way into school lunch bags and the hearts of children and, soon, youngsters elsewhere. The product line encompasses a wide range of varieties to satisfy the tastes and eating habits of Kiri consumers around the globe. As tasty as ever, the cheese continues to win over young foodies without forgetting its adult fans, who rediscover in the brand a true taste of childhood. In Vietnam market, Kiri is marketed as cheese primarily made from true milk and cream cheese to bring a soft texture, creamy flavor cheese products to not only children and teenagers but adults who love to experience cheese with milky and creamy taste.

At Bel, we are committed to offer you a unique experience, which is encouraging your professional fulfillment and can be summed up as: Be you. Be ambitious. Be Bel.

If like the 12,000 employees of Bel in the world and you want to experience the Bel effect and see the impact of an entrepreneurial adventure, demanding and enthusiastic about your professional development: dare the Bel experience!

________________________________Be You - Measure the impact of your contribution________________________________

The signature of Bel "From the smile to be shared" is explicit. We embody the Group's desire to offer our employees a motivating work environment, in which everyone can bring their skills, their desire to realize themselves and measure the impact of their contribution. In a group that sees enthusiasm as a performance factor, the personality of the employees makes the difference. Competence, sincerity and audacity are for us the vectors of commitment and success.

______________________Be Ambitious - Take on the challenge of growing an international group______________________

Bel shows strong growth ambitions. The strength of our brands, our unique expertise in miniaturization and its innate sense of innovation are solid assets that enable the us to be confident about our ability to grow. A confidence reinforced by the talent and agility of its teams that carry the transformation of Bel.

Bel wishes our employees to contribute their energy, their ideas, their desire to get involved to accompany their development. Their challenge is to invent, reinvent, realize, support and develop their teams. So be ambitious, and meet the challenges of growing an international group whose products are consumed and loved around the world.

___________________________________________Be Bel – Dare to experience___________________________________________

Bel is a demanding company, which makes the development engines and the audacity of our employees. A company on a human scale, enthusiastic and inspiring, Bel encourages its teams to cultivate excellence, agility and risk-taking. Our values ​​- Benevolence, Audacity and Commitment - combine our teams around a mobilizing company project built on innovation, societal commitment, transformation and team development.

Marketing, sales, finance, production, engineering, development, logistics ... All our businesses are concerned by our growth challenge.

GROW YOUR TALENT - BEL UNIVERSITY

Our Bel strategic plan is setting very high growth ambition. With the goal of doubling in size by 2025, we understand that our drive and success is strongly rooted on the capacity of our organization and people, to learn and to develop new skill sets and new ways of doing things.

At Bel, a University is built and developed at the crossroad of all learning and development opportunities. Its mission is to coordinate, facilitate and develop innovative learning and development opportunities to Bel employees combining several learning approaches including classroom training, e-learning but also new formats like mobile learning or workshop provided on demand. Offering continuous opportunities for skills development is our major commitment. We believe this is a key component of a motivating professional career.

Our philosophy and mutual commitment: People first

Bel’s mission is to share smiles with families by bringing them the pleasure of dairy goodness.

A smile which comes from the heart of our employees who fulfill their potential in their working lives and continuously develop themselves through Bel opportunities. For us, happy people create successful organizations and we strongly believe that the success of Bel comes from the quality and the involvement of its teams. We have translated this vision into principles that will engage the entire Bel community to include its management and all employees:

• It is our common goal that Bel becomes a place where people can achieve their highest potential by providing them with a meaningful work and environment, and contribute towards the sustainable development of the Company.
  
• It is the Bel management’s responsibility to live by the Group’s values, act as role models, and develop their employees and teams.
  
• It is the employee’s responsibility to embrace these growth opportunities by proactively striving for professional achievement and pursuing personal development.
  

To realize our ambition of making Bel a great place in which to work, we have articulated 4 main commitments that tie together Bel, our team leaders and team members:

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Our Value

Dare

To dare is vital to our leadership. It spurs all our employees to action and helps them make decisions in a complicated and unpredictable world. Our agile organization and teams’ enthusiasm encourage creativity and challenges of the status quo. Daring fuels innovation and performance in all of our occupations.

Commit

We commit individually and collectively to operational excellence in all of our activities. Our commitment further extends to taking into account the expectations of all our stakeholders, including our employees, consumers, institutions, clients and suppliers, in our decisions. We contribute to achieving Bel’s ambitions through the skill development, quality requirement and respect for our environment.

Care

For us, caring is the guiding spirit in our internal and external company relations, a spirit reflected in our Sharing Smiles signature. We believe strongly in relations that are close, straightforward and demanding but fair. We nurture a climate of trust and respect that cultivates the desire to grow, act, and succeed. Like our brands, we are convinced that optimism and enthusiasm make all the difference as positive transformative factors in society.

Responsibility is at the heart of the Bel's decision-making process, with the presence of a Human Resources, Communication and Sustainable Development Department within the Executive Committee. Commitment to our consumers, our employees, our community and environment are part of our DNA.

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A.  To Consumers

• Providing information sought by consumers: Bel displays the minimum basic nutritional information required by regulation on our packaging. Whenever the size of the packaging allows, detailed nutritional information on the portion is provided. Packaging provides consumers with information during the purchasing process. To make it easier to read, the Group is gradually rolling out a simple, visual, uniform marking system on all our packaging.

• Adopting good food habits: The Bel charter encourages not only good naturedness, but also good eating habits. We believe that it’s our responsibility to guarantee the quality, traceability and safety of our products, from the earliest stages of the production chain through to consumption. Each production site is governed by stringent quality and safety requirements so that we can stay close to our consumers and maintain the trust of our employees, customers, and distributors.

• Avoid wasting food: Food wastage by consumers has a high environmental impact because it includes those generated throughout the life cycle of the finished product: production of raw materials, processing, transportation and storage. The individual portion format that Bel makes available to consumers allows optimum conservation of the product, even after the pack has been opened. The fact that this format avoids food waste is the second reason for buying the product, after convenience.

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B.  To Employees

• Inspirational and federative social model: Bel's federating social model makes it possible to reconcile economic and financial performance with the development of the men and women across the country sites. All human resource policies are harmonized to respect specific local cultures and reflect the mindset of the Bel's slogan: "Sharing smiles".

• Occupational health, safety and well-being: For several years now, Bel has been implementing continuous improvement processes tailored to the diversity and complexity of the situations encountered.

• Severe working conditions and occupational illness: By reducing manual load lifting and uncomfortable postures, the Group is taking action to prevent musculoskeletal diseases. Furthermore, the Group has identified three additional factors of discomfort that can affect employees working in its factories: noise, night work and repetitive tasks. Plants are gradually setting up action plans to reduce these factors of discomfort and offer a healthy and safe working environment for employees.

• Organization of work: In a socio-economic context which leads to the constant search for productivity improvement, Bel has identified several factors which directly impact the occupational well-being of its employees: 
           +  Organization of working hours and commuting
           +  Organization of offices, workshops and relaxation areas
           +  Work relations
        +  Changes in working methods with, in particular, the development of digital technology which can adversely impact the balance between working life and private life
           +  The availability of high-performing tools, some of which can reduce the professional travel of employees 

• Monitoring accidents: Bel has made health and safety a top priority. Since 2012, the Group tracks the frequency rate of all accidents covered by a medical procedure regardless of whether or not they lead to lost days, which affect not only its employees, but also all persons present on Bel’s sites: visitors, subcontractors and temporary staffs.

• Health and Wellness is a Priority:
           +  Multiple medical, dental, and vision plan options
           +  Company-paid short and long term disability & life insurance

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C.  To Environment 

We believe that our corporate responsibility goes beyond the doorstep of our plants, and that we actively impact the environment and our local communities–so we’re committed to conducting business in a respectful and caring way. This mindset and willingness to share with as many people as possible, is encapsulated in our “sharing smiles” tagline and the way we do business every day.

We’re committed to protecting our entire product life cycle, from fully understanding nutritional dosing to preventing waste by consumers. Our innovation and industrial expertise means there are processes in place for continuous improvement in our production facilities, and actions are carried out throughout the life cycle of our products to reduce their impact on the environment.

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D.  To community 

The Bel Foundation, created by the Bel Group and its reference shareholder Unibel, supports initiatives on behalf of children and teens, with a particular emphasis on food and dietary issues.

Since the Foundation was established in 2008, more than 150 projects have been supported, which represents almost one and a half million euros in donations made to charitable organizations that act on behalf of children around the world. We are proud of our support for concrete and sustainable initiatives that help communities where the Bel Group is present.

We will continue to develop this momentum in the coming years to ensure that our Foundation resembles the image of our company, a human adventure with a mission our employees can be proud of. To that end, our employees are free to get involved in good citizenship initiatives on behalf of children and may solicit financial support from the Bel Foundation. This is a way to extend the Group's mission beyond the company's doorstep and to remain close to our local communities.

Bel Foundation - Vietnam

Un Enfant Par La Main is an international charity whose mission is to support the poorest children and families through child sponsorship. It also finances micro-development projects, and efficient and sustainable initiatives based on community participation.

Bel supports a malnutrition prevention and reduction project for children under the age of five in Bach Thong, Vietnam. Families are provided with training to improve their pediatric and nutritional knowledge and practices. To prevent malnutrition, and to treat at-risk children and those suffering from severe malnutrition, food supplements are then distributed. The children in the program receive regular health checkups to detect malnutrition-related illnesses that can affect their growth. Medication is also distributed free of charge to sick children.

‘Sharing Smiles to the Moon” charity event in 2016 was organized to support a good cause to bring ‘Smiles” and provide help to needy and underprivileged children at Thuan An disabled school in Binh Duong province.

The program was initiating for a long-term sequence of community activities Bel will contribute for the well-being of Vietnam society in the future. Several hundreds of gifts, nutrition foods, scholarship and entertainment activities was prepared to more than 400 poor & disabled children who have dreams to fulfill, get more motive power to overcome difficulties and achieve better learning. 

Followed by another fund in 2017 for the school to acquire 10 hearing aids devices for disabled kids in learning. 

EMPLOYEES' STORIES

NGUYEN HOANG LOC UYEN_______________________________________________________________________________________
HR MANAGER

“My own story is a great example of Bel’s Social Charter in practice.”

Bel is a loyal employer who pays attention to his employees. The Group offers development opportunities to those who know how to seize them and really invests in its employees. They benefit in particular from accompaniment to build their careers or take on new responsibilities. I particularly appreciate the" People First "mindset that makes wellness and work - life balance a priority, and offers a positive work environment. Bel is a demanding company with strong performance ambitions. But this requirement must be in line with Group values. Bel is committed to the development of its employees, sets ambitious goals that advance them, while maintaining a benevolent attitude.

NGUYEN CAO TUONG DUNG_______________________________________________________________________________________
ASSISTANT KEY ACCOUNT MANAGER  

"If you are passionate about cheese, then you will love it here"

Bel has provided extensive cross-functional experiences that will help me achieve my career goals. When I worked in our Trade Marketing function, I was able to transition between brands and gain knowledge of new categories. I was then successfully able to transition with full support from both functions. It is truly fun to work at a place that invests heavily into building its brands and people. Bel Brands are focused on growth, which provides a lot of excitement and career opportunities. The culture is supportive of change and encourages new ideas. Bel allows everyone to evolve the business. Each employee is an actor in the Group's culture, of what it is today and will be tomorrow.

NGUYEN XUAN PHUOC____________________________________________________________________________________________
IMPORT- EXPORT COORDINATOR    

“Bel’s strength is a willingness to collaborate.”

I joined Bel for the chance to be part of a recognized brand and a growing business. The part I play is to ensure we provide an excellent service to customers by maintaining the logistic part of the supply chain department: making sure we can sustain the flow of the overall business. Bel’s strength is the willingness to bring everyone together to collaborate. The senior team is always keen to hear people’s opinions and look at ways to improve the day-to-day business environment. This ethos has created a great working atmosphere, where people care about what they’re doing.

LY LINH NGAN____________________________________________________________________________________________________
JUNIOR BRAND MANAGER  

“It’s my job to understand the shopper, market and competition.”

I actually joined Bel as an Assistant Brand Manager first then promoted to Junior Brand Manager within a time of one year! My journey to Brand Manager has covered many of the Brand's activities & management, and more recently the focus on brand innovation. That’s the great thing about Bel – the opportunity for experience & career development. And, of course, our commitment to building strong brands. You reap what you sow within the Bel business. If you are prepared to work hard and prove yourself, not only will this be re-paid by promotional opportunities, but also the international presence of the business means there are opportunities internationally.

NGUYEN DUY BAO________________________________________________________________________________________________

IT MANAGER  

"Great brands, great culture and great people"

I have been with Bel for 20 years—I now manage IT scope and other related IT business functions for Bel ASEAN and Asia Pacific. Bel benefits are great, but working here means more than just that. In the years I have worked at Bel I have met many great people across Bel entities, and real friendships have developed. When people come to Bel they stick around, and when you are with these people over the years they become your family. We all work together and care about each other, and are committed to helping our coworkers and watching out for them. I can watch employees and know they care, that they want to produce a top quality product and are committed to doing so. We all want to be the best Bel, and I feel we will make it! Some days it gets a little chaotic, but I love a challenge, am very happy at Bel, and actually love my job.

PHAM THU HA____________________________________________________________________________________________________
QUALITY & REGULATION MANAGER  

"Bel has retained its friendly family atmosphere and great values.”

With management support and training, the production and Quality teams at Bel Vietnam work together to produce the highest quality product in a safe and productive manner. Everybody contributes on a daily basis, finding ways to improve the way we run product. My co-workers and I take pride in our work and strive to make a product the customer will be satisfied with, and management always seeks out our input regarding how our process is running. The best thing about working at Bel is being rewarded and acknowledged for a job well done, and the encouragement we get along the way. Also, the people I work closely with make coming to work enjoyable every day.