company profile Hyvest Group
Hygiene group refocused to meet growing demand
Kevin Clarke
During a time when the multiple facets of hygiene has become tremendously prominent in the fight against a deadly pandemic, it is appropriate to take a closer look at a leading company that plays a frontline role in the supply of cleaning and hygiene products to the African market. In this company profile Hyvest Group CEO Kevin Clarke offers a current overview of the Hyvest Group that present diverse and tailored solutions to add value for customers.
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he Hyvest Group of companies is best described as a support supply business to the African hygiene, cleaning, hospitality, healthcare and industrial markets. The group offers diverse manufacturing capabilities in hygiene dispensing systems, liquid and powder chemical blending, a variety of aerosol offerings along with an away-from-home paper converting business and distributes its comprehensive basket of products across the African continent. The history of the group stems from 2005 with the greenfield start-up of its first business Hygiene Systems (HS) that focused on the wholesale supply of washroom dispensing systems and their allied soap, sanitiser and aerosol consumables in support of the washroom service providing industry. Over the last 16 years, Hygiene Systems has introduced many of the programmable dispenser technologies that have shaped the African hygiene industry. Today HS offers customers a choice of several different matching dispensing ranges and consumables that it has developed and manufactured to suit the African hygiene market conditions, as well as bespoke and exclusive product ranges that are designed and manufactured to specific customer requirements. By 2014, consumable sales volumes had created the need to vertically
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African Cleaning Review July/August 2021
integrate the supply chain in soap, sanitiser and hand soaps, which led to the acquisition of SMP - Specialised Maintenance Products, a Gautengbased chemical and aerosol blending company with a long history in chemical and aerosol production capabilities. SMP had two operating divisions, one which focused on providing product development and private label chemical and aerosol products to wholesalers and resellers and a second division that focused on the industrial channel in the mining, transport and engineering sectors with its own tried and tested range of specialised lubricants, additives and cleaning chemicals. The next step in the evolution of the group was to integrate the away-fromhome paper supply chain and, after two unsuccessful years of searching for a suitable acquisition in the paper converting space, it was decided to start a paper converting business and in 2015 The Paper Connection (TPC) was born. Today TPC has the capability of converting a complete range of 1- and 2-ply toilet tissue and hand towel roll and folded products that can be private labelled and are widely distributed to numerous away-from-home markets. The ability to convert a complete basket of away-from-home paper products and hand hygiene formulations, attracted the interest of several larger healthcare groups who
were actively looking for alternative supply solutions, and a decision was taken to start a business that focused on hand hygiene solutions to the healthcare industry and the company Hymed was formed to grow the group’s paper volumes into the healthcare sector. A strategic decision to refocus the group’s business to business aspirations on three specific industry sectors where future African growth opportunities are perceived to be, namely mining, healthcare and hospitality led to the acquisition of Fresh iD, a KZN-based hospitality hygiene business focused predominantly on the provision of professional hygiene chemicals and dosing systems and cleaning solutions to the hospitality and food services sectors. Fresh iD which has been rebranded as Fresh, has entered into an exclusive partnership with both Christeyns, a world leader in low-impact laundry chemistry, and Otek, a world leader in Ozone laundry technology providing state-of-the-art, low environmental impact and cost-saving solutions to the textile laundering industry. The Christeyns laundry chemical range will be manufactured locally under license by SMP. With this three-way partnership, Fresh is poised to become an industry leader in this sector.
