Moving from compliance to competitive advantage across OHS + Food Safety
By Pieter Erasmus, CEO – SafetySA
In 2026, the fastest way to misunderstand “safety” is to file it under compliance.
Compliance is what you do to avoid trouble. Strategic safety is what you do to run a better business: fewer surprises, less downtime, faster market access, stronger tenders, and trust that doesn’t evaporate the first time something goes wrong.
And something always goes wrong. The only question is whether it’s a small deviation you catch early, or a high-profile failure you explain publicly.
That’s the big shift: safety failures don’t fail quietly anymore. They fail commercially and reputationally, amplified by social media, supplier scrutiny, customer audits, and rising expectations from insurers and regulators. One poor decision – one ignored hazard, one contaminated batch, one compromised control – can turn into operational stoppage, product withdrawal, tender losses, and a brand that suddenly feels “unsafe” to the market.
The organisations that will lead this decade are those that treat safety as a strategic risk management system – not a department, and certainly not a box to be ticked.
With that shift underway, I’d like to unpack some of the most significant safety and risk trends shaping South African organisations as we enter 2026, and show how an integrated approach to safety gives businesses a clear strategic advantage – improving both performance and cost efficiency.
Top Safety and Risk Trends Shaping South African Organisations In 2026
In South Africa, the landscape is tightening from both directions: occupational health and safety (OHS) and food safety.
Trend 1: The compliance baseline is tightening (and it’s getting more measurable)
On the OHS side, new regulations such as the Physical Agents Regulations, 2024 were promulgated under the Occupational Health and Safety Act in Government Gazette 6 March 2025 – part of a broader set that includes Noise Exposure Regulations and related explanatory notes published by the Department of Employment and Labour.
On the food side, the legal baseline for hygiene governance is explicit: Regulation R638 (June 2018) sets general hygiene requirements for food premises and transport and anchors the Certificate of Acceptability (COA) as a licence-to-operate requirement for food-handling premises.
These aren’t abstract technicalities. They reflect the direction the world is moving: from “have a system” to “prove the system works”.
Trend 2: Safety Risk Has Fused with Brand Risk
Customers and communities increasingly judge organisations through the lens of citizenship and trust: how you treat employees, how you protect consumers, how you manage supply chains. One incident can trigger a chain reaction: operational disruption → reputational backlash → customer churn → tender losses.
Trend 3: Food safety is becoming more traceable, more auditable, and less forgiving
When it comes to food safety, the emotional threshold is lower. People might tolerate a delayed delivery; they don’t tolerate being harmed by what they eat.
Foodborne events are also treated with urgency at a public-health level. South Africa’s notifiable medical conditions guidance defines Category 1 conditions as requiring immediate reporting followed by notification within 24 hours, and the NICD’s disease list includes food-borne disease outbreak as Category 1.
Translation: when things go wrong, the expectation is speed – traceability, records, evidence, response readiness.
Trend 4: Standards are shifting from “paper compliance” to “proof in practice”
On top of law and public health, the market itself is raising the bar. For many supply chains, certification is no longer “nice to have” – it’s the ticket to participate.
FSSC 22000 Version 6 audits became mandatory from 1 April 2024, with certified organisations required to complete the upgrade audit by 31 March 2025.
That shift matters because customers and auditors are signalling: we’re less interested in paperwork, more interested in control effectiveness and culture.
Trend 5: Economic pressure increases the temptation to underinvest, exactly when risk is more expensive
When budgets tighten, some organisations cut safety efforts because it feels discretionary. That’s how you get “cost savings” that later become shutdowns, delistings, lawsuits, and director-level pain. In constrained conditions, safety isn’t a cost – it’s operational resilience.
Why an Integrated Approach to Safety Creates Competitive Advantage
When organisations struggle with safety, it’s rarely because they don’t care. It’s because they manage risk in fragments.
OHS sits here. Food safety sits there. Quality somewhere else. Procurement has suppliers. Operations has throughput. Everyone is busy – often sincerely – and yet the business still carries blind spots and duplicated effort.
An integrated approach is not a bigger policy document. It’s a better operating model: a single view of critical risk across people + product + process + suppliers, governed by one executive rhythm.
When risk management is integrated:
- leaders prioritise what truly matters (the few risks that can break the business),
- assurance becomes coordinated (not duplicated audits and “evidence scavenger hunts”),
- corrective actions close out root causes (not just close out Excel rows),
- and data becomes decision-useful (controls are monitored, not assumed).
This is where safety becomes a business enabler. Because integration reduces friction: fewer repeated audits, fewer last-minute scrambles before inspections, fewer “surprises” that stop production or block market access.
Doing More With Less: How Prioritising Safety Improves Performance and Cost Efficiency
Unsafe operations are expensive operations. This is true in OHS and food safety – and the costs show up as operational friction long before the headline incident.
In 2026’s cost pressure, many organisations are asked to do more with less. The trap is to treat safety as discretionary spend. The reality is the opposite: unsafe operations are expensive operations.
On the OHS side, the hidden cost stack includes downtime, investigations, legal exposure, equipment damage, insurance volatility, and management time diverted into firefighting.
On the food side, the hidden cost stack includes product holds, rework and waste, lab retesting cycles, delisting risk, recall readiness, and the long-term cost of reputational damage in a market that remembers.
So the ROI framing becomes simple:
Safety ROI = avoided disruption + improved throughput + faster assurance + higher win-rate + stronger trust
If your safety programme can’t explain value in those terms, it’s not strategic risk management. It’s compliance administration.
Culture Changes When Leaders Build Habits, Not Slogans
Culture is often the biggest barrier because it’s the easiest thing to talk about and the hardest thing to operationalise. A future-ready safety culture is not fear-based and not poster-based. It is risk-intelligent and control-obsessed: people understand hazards, know why controls matter, and believe leadership will back them when they raise issues.
The leadership habits that reliably shift culture are boring—and that’s the point:
- consistent presence where risk lives (plants, sites, kitchens, labs),
- a clear rule: “We don’t trade uncontrolled risk for output,”
- rapid reinforcement when someone stops unsafe work,
- and a rhythm of accountability that measures control health, not just incident stats.
In food environments specifically, future-ready culture includes discipline in sanitation changeovers, allergen controls, traceability drills, and the ability to respond fast when something deviates.
Where SafetySA Fits In
SafetySA’s purpose is making the world a safer place. We make risk management easier for clients: faster insight, fewer blind spots, less duplication, and more confidence – across both OHS and food safety. That’s why we sit across testing, inspection, certification, and training: because fragmented solutions create fragmented risk pictures.
And we’re entering a new phase. SafetySA has announced CTI as a new shareholder, positioning this as the next chapter of growth, innovation, and global collaboration.
For clients, the practical upside is broader capability, stronger cross-border support, and faster evolution of integrated solutions, without losing the local expertise needed to execute in South Africa.
If safety is treated as a compliance cost, it will always be squeezed. If safety is treated as a strategic operating system, it becomes a lever for reliability, speed, growth, and trust.
Safety doesn’t slow the business down. It’s bad safety that does.
