Letter From Our CEO
Much has changed in the year since we issued our first report and much has stayed the same. What has remained constant is our commitment to doing what we believe is right—for our employees, our consumers, our investors, our animals and the environment. What has changed is how we think about those efforts and how we talk about them.
As part of our continued focus on responsibility, we took three important steps this year:
- We appointed a Director of Environmental Sustainability, Dennis Boik, to lead and monitor our environmental sustainability efforts
- We have made a concerted effort to better quantify our performance against certain key metrics, including consumption of water and energy
- We have more clearly articulated our corporate responsibility principles as part of a broader effort to define our mission, vision and values
A substantial part of this year has been spent working to better quantify our performance, both to see where we stand and to provide benchmarks to measure future progress. In doing so, the scope of the report changed. The 2006-2007 report is more inclusive—measuring the company based on the majority of farm, plant, subsidiary and corporate office locations. In addition, our operations expanded since our last report with acquisitions of Provena Foods (second quarter of FY 2006), Valley Fresh (first quarter of FY 2006) and Saag’s (first quarter of FY 2007).
We continue to focus on responsibility and evaluate areas where we can improve.
In this report, you will now find:
- Goals for reducing solid waste, water use and energy use
- Stories that profile our employees, our partners and our specific projects that demonstrate how we are living our principles every day
- Data related to the environment, survey results and employee diversity
We also have better expressed what ideals we are holding our company to through a values-based program called Our Way.
Our Way defines our company values and helps shape what we believe corporate responsibility is and how we want to communicate our mission at Hormel Foods.
Our Way expresses our principles. And this document, our Corporate Responsibility Report, expresses how we think we are living up to those principles.
I encourage you to share your thoughts on how we are doing and what more we can do.
Many thanks,
Jeffrey M. Ettinger
Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer
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a full copy of the report.