Müller Milk & Ingredients | ISEP Sustainability Skills for Managers & the Workforce

About Müller Milk & Ingredients

Müller Milk & Ingredients (MMI) is part of Müller UK & Ireland, a family-run dairy business and one of the UK's best-known dairy names. Formed following the acquisition of Dairy Crest in December 2015, MMI is the UK's leading producer and distributor of fresh milk, cream, butter and dairy ingredients, with its UK head office at Tern Valley Business Park in Market Drayton, Shropshire.

The scale of the operation is considerable. MMI's logistics function delivers over 2.6 billion litres of fresh milk each year to more than 5,500 locations across Britain, moving milk from farm to fridge through a network of strategically located depots. Supporting that operation is a lean but highly experienced health and safety function organised across three UK regions.

Each region is looked after by a Regional Health & Safety Manager — Nicola Barnes, Hayley Randall and Jon Wolfe — who together coordinate this training across the whole of the UK. Nicola Barnes, who looks after five distribution sites and brings almost three decades of HSE experience to the role, shared Müller's experience of the programme.

The Challenge

With health and safety long established as a core discipline, Müller's distribution business recognised that its environmental efforts needed the same structured focus. Good work was already happening on the ground, but it hadn't yet been formalised into a consistent, business-wide approach — and the team wanted to bring the wider workforce along with them. Nicola is candid about where the business had reached on its environmental journey:

“Our focus has realistically been on health and safety, and because we're in a changing environment at Müller, distribution has perhaps been a little bit behind on the environmental efforts. That's not to say work hasn't been done, but it probably hadn't been formalised. We needed to get other members of the team more focused on environmental issues — to give them a basic understanding of what we need to do as a business.”

Müller's objectives were to:

• Build environmental awareness and understanding at all management levels within Logistics.
• Extend that awareness to the wider workforce, giving frontline teams a foundational grasp of environmental issues.
• Formalise the business's environmental approach alongside its established health and safety culture.
• Deliver that training flexibly and consistently across three UK regions and a lean, shift-based workforce spread over multiple sites.

The Solution | ISEP Sustainability Skills, Manager to Frontline

Müller addressed these goals with two complementary ISEP courses from Astutis: Sustainability Skills for Managers and Sustainability Skills for the Workforce. Having run the Managers course for several years, Müller extended environmental training to the wider workforce in 2026, working with their Key Account Manager at Astutis, Adam Cooper, to roll out the Workforce course to other levels of the organisation. Nicola explains how that next step came about:

“We've been doing the Skills for Managers course for a couple of years, and it was only this year that we decided we wanted a general awareness course for other levels down. We spoke to Adam and went for ISEP for Workers as well.”

The choice of Astutis was driven by an established, trusted relationship rather than any single course — Müller simply asked what environmental training was available through a provider they already knew well:

“Rather than choosing those particular courses necessarily, we chose Astutis because of the relationship we have with you. So it was a question of asking what courses were available to us.”

Why Online Learning Worked for Müller

Both ISEP courses were delivered online — a deliberate choice for a lean team operating across three regions, multiple sites and varied shift patterns. Online delivery removed the logistical challenge of releasing groups of people at once and gave employees the freedom to learn in a way that suited them, including in their own time. For Nicola, that flexibility was the deciding factor:

“It's really the flexibility of people being able to do it at different times. We're fairly lean in terms of numbers, and when you're trying to get a group together to make an on-site course cost-effective, that can be quite difficult — sometimes you can only release a couple of people at a time. With an online course the flexibility is much better, and it lets employees complete the courses at home rather than having to come into site. That degree of flexibility is really the key thing for us.”

Visibility Across Three Regions | The Astutis Learning Campus

Flexible learning only works at scale if the people coordinating it can see what's happening. Delegates access their ISEP courses through the Astutis Learning Campus, our Totara-powered Learning Management System, giving each learner a personal login and 24/7 access to course materials from any device — whether that's at a depot, at home or on the move.

For Nicola, Hayley and Jon, the LMS provides the oversight that makes a UK-wide rollout manageable. Rather than chasing individual updates, each Regional Health & Safety Manager can monitor the progress of their online delegates at a glance, see who has started, who is midway through and who has completed, and draw on reporting and analytics to build a picture of engagement across their region. Automated reminders help keep learners on track, reducing the administrative burden on the regional teams.

Because all three regions run the same courses through the same platform, the training is consistent from region to region while each manager retains visibility of their own delegates — supporting a genuinely national approach to environmental awareness.

The Results

The impact of the Workforce course in particular has been clear, broadening how employees think about environmental responsibility and boosting engagement with Müller's wider initiatives. Nicola has seen the difference in how teams now think about the subject:

“The feedback from the Workers course has been really good. The employees found it useful and interesting, and they now have a better understanding of the breadth of things that come under environment — it's not just putting the right things in the right bins. It broadened people's horizons.”

Crucially, the training gave Müller's teams the rationale behind the company's environmental push — turning passive awareness into active participation. Nicola describes the shift in engagement:

“There's been a lot more engagement when we're trying to roll out environmental activities and initiatives. The course has given the employees the pre-work to understand why we're doing what we're doing, and the rationale for why we need to keep progressing it.”

That momentum is already pointing towards the next stage, with environmental champions emerging alongside Müller's established safety champions, and quarterly environmental campaigns running across all sites. Nicola sees the benefits extending beyond the workplace and into everyday habits:

“It just promotes that awareness, but it also promotes good ideas from the employees. People realise we're just like big households effectively — it's not just at work now, it's at home as well.”

A Relationship Built to Last

For Müller, the value of the ISEP programme sits within a broader partnership defined by its ease, its range of courses, and the strength of the working relationships behind it — from account management to the tutors delivering on site. Nicola sums up why Müller continues to return to Astutis:

“There's a good range of courses across all sorts of different platforms. We've established a good relationship with Adam as our account manager, and with the tutors we've had on our sites. It's an easy relationship — we have good communication — and it's an established relationship now that we expect to continue.”

Müller's experience shows how the right environmental training, delivered flexibly and supported by a platform that gives training coordinators full visibility, can help a business formalise its sustainability ambitions — embedding awareness from the management team to the frontline, across every region, and building the foundations for a lasting culture of environmental responsibility.

Discover how the ISEP Sustainability Skills for Managers and Sustainability Skills for the Workforce courses can help your business formalise its environmental ambitions — from the leadership team to the frontline. Explore our ISEP courses or speak to our team about a training partnership tailored to your organisation.