Issue 6 | October 2020
A Message from our Chief Sustainability Officer

October at OSI is a time for everyone at the company to reflect on the important role he or she plays in ensuring the highest safety and quality of the food we produce. Facilities around the world have marked Food Safety Week with activities and discussions — many held virtually this year — to remind ourselves that any impact, change or culture "starts with me."

But this thinking doesn't only apply to Food Safety. I'm proud that so many of the sustainability goals we care deeply about have been driven by employee interest and initiative. Across the company, we recognize the importance of every individual's personal commitments to sustainability and we encourage their innovative thinking as we work to solve challenging issues within our industry. 

This issue celebrates the innovation, dedication and contributions individuals and groups within OSI have made to ensure our operations and supply chains are constantly improving and becoming more sustainable. It also highlights some of the work we have done to support them. This includes providing subject-matter specific training for those with direct responsibility over purchasing decisions. Employees in procurement and quality assurance are the critical actors in sourcing and maintaining sourcing standards and have played a key role in managing and engaging suppliers regarding our expectations. We have also always taken care to educate all new hires against our sustainability objectives and regularly offer opportunities for all employees to participate in subsequent training on targeted sustainability topics.

It’s important to us that OSI's sustainability commitment isn't just a top-down company order. As you'll see in this issue, employees want to know what is happening in our upstream sourcing practices and feel connected to driving sustainability impact in our business. They are driving change and putting the OSI sustainability gears in motion. And we couldn't be prouder.

Sincerely,
Nicole Johnson-Hoffman

P.S. Did you know that most of the newsletter stories and others can be found on the OSI Sustainability Blog? A new story is published every Thursday. I encourage you to visit the blog often and let us know what you think and if you have a recommendation for a story to be featured.

Every day, OSI facilities around the world produce products that leading food companies put their names on, trusting that they meet the most rigorous safety and quality standards. That trust, as OSI President Dave McDonald puts it, is OSI's "badge of honor."

This month, OSI facilities around the world celebrated another successful Global Food Safety Week, events dedicated to strengthening food safety culture and giving members of the OSI family a chance to reflect on the roles they play in maintaining the high standards OSI customers have come to trust. Outside of the annual event, however, Food Safety remains a year round, non-negotiable top priority, driven by company leadership and OSI's Global Food Safety and Quality Council.

Recently, OSI Europe launched a new set of sanitation policies to encourage the standardization of food production facilities globally. The aim of these policies is to ensure effective levels of performance and programs with aligned procedures and controls for sanitation to assure high levels of cleanliness of food processing equipment and environment.
Our environmental goals are ambitious. We seek to not only elevate our own standards, but to lead the industry in establishing new norms around sustainable sourcing and food production. The work begins within our own business, where we are working hard to measure our environmental impact and then challenge ourselves to do better.

On August 26, 2020 OSI voluntarily disclosed detailed information about potential impacts the company and its supply chain may have on the climate and forests. The annual disclosure was made to the CDP, a non-profit organization dedicated to addressing human impacts on climate change.

Additionally, OSI Europe is working hard to find solutions and adopt measures to help reduce the carbon intensity of the entire organization.

With the business targeting 2025 to reduce total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 30%, OSI Europe is implementing measures to understand and help reduce the carbon footprint intensity of dairy-beef systems in Poland and Germany.

OSI Europe is also focusing on the organizational footprint of its beef processing joint venture at Pickstock Telford and at the manufacturing site in Scunthorpe with a target to make both these sites carbon neutral by 2025
OSI sees conservation of water and other key resources as fundamental to our business success and commitments to our customers, our people and the diverse areas of the world in which we operate. We recognize that water is one of the planet's most valuable resources and have set ambitious goals to reduce our water usage globally by 15% in the next five years. OSI's Vista Processed Foods in India has been innovating solutions to reduce water use in plants and on their supplying farms.

In Australia, OSI's Turosi's environmental commitment guides the company in doing its part toward reducing waste both within its operation and that of its customers. In April 2018, the Australian Federal Government established “2025 national packaging targets'' to create a new sustainable pathway for companies to manage packaging in Australia. These ambitious targets were set to reduce the amount of waste generated and make it easier for product packaging to be recycled. One year later, Turosi, published five sustainability commitments that aligned with those national packaging targets and established a strong foundation for the success Turosi is seeing in its packaging operations today.

OSI Europe’s Operations Director and Head of Sustainability, Claire Donoghue, was named Board Chair of the the European Roundtable for Beef Sustainability (ERBS) — the largest multi-stakeholder group for beef sustainability in Europe — on July 15, 2020. As Donoghue steps into her new role, we are excited to watch and support her as she shepherds even more farmers, factories and other players toward big improvements, one attainable step at a time.

We also celebrated the 2020 U.S.-based interns and trainees — including the first-ever Rotational Management trainee to focus on sustainability — who adhered to strict health and safety measures to complete their programs amid challenging circumstances. They are our future.
At OSI, we are continually researching and adopting new technologies and solutions to further improve supply chain sustainability.

To that end, in the last two years, we have been working hard in each of our commodity areas and markets to establish sourcing programs that are free from the most important drugs for human medicine, known as High Priority Critically Important Antimicrobials (HPCIA) and have been piloting best practice programs that result in the reduction of antibiotic use.

And in Europe, OSI is working with technology partners to trial a robot called ChickenBoy that is capable of frequently monitoring and evaluating broiler bird health and welfare parameters to improve production and advance chicken sustainability.
Highlights from OSI's Global Food Safety Week 2020
OSI facilities and offices around the world participated in the company's third annual Global Food Safety Week. Like previous iterations, the week offered employees across the company time to pause amid the bustle of daily activities to reflect on the roles they each play in ensuring the food OSI produces meets the highest safety and quality standards.

This year, each OSI region — North America, Asia Pacific and Europe — developed its own activities tied to a food safety theme.

Below are highlights of activities conducted in each region.
Europe
In Europe and North America, facilities and offices organized activities around the theme "Food Safety Begins With Me."

In Germany, OSI offices invited staff to make the rounds through colorful stations where they could engage in interactive tutorials on everything from mask wearing to safely storing food products. And in England, each day of the week had its own slogan — such as “Chance Takers Are Accident Makers” and “Safe Food Saves Lives” — with a daily lesson and accompanying activity.
North America
At our corporate headquarters, OSI offered staff access to a range of video tutorials reviewing food safety topics relevant both on and off the job. Topics included: proper hand washing, food safety for moms-to-be, and food safety and shopping. Senior management also discussed the importance of a food safety culture and invited employees to sign a food safety banner adorning corporate headquarters. 

Several offices included games and encouraged family participation throughout the week, such as a spin-the-wheel game to identify allergens in Edmonton (Canada), a food safety slogan contest in West Chicago, and a food safety coloring/poster contest for kids and families in Wisconsin.
Asia-Pacific
In the Asia-Pacific region, activities were tied to the theme "Building Food Safety Culture Is In Everything We Do." Leaders similarly sent messages about the importance of food safety to all employees at OSI plants, and organized activities focused on good manufacturing practices. Activities included webinar-based training, workshops and sessions dedicated to the sharing of best practices around the prevention of food safety problems. Employees were separately invited to offer anonymous suggestions to plant managers about improving food safety and quality practices and some were honored with "food safety guardian star" awards.