Source: Rita Jane Gabbett, MEATINGPLACE, 7/14/15


Smithfield Foods has set new sustainability targets, saying it has surpassed or is achieving many of those it set in 2010 around animal care, environment, employees, food safety, and helping communities.
The company listed the following achievements in recent years:
• Animal care: As of Dec. 31, 2014, 71.4 percent of company-owned farms housed pregnant sows in group systems.
• Employee safety: The company beat the total rate of injuries for all industries (not just the meat industry), with a 5 percent reduction in 2014 in all incident rates over 2013.
• Environmental stewardship: Smithfield reduced (normalized) water use by more than 18 percent, normalized solid waste to landfill by nearly 41 percent, and normalized greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 9.6 percent. 
• Food safety: The company had no product recalls in the United States during 2014. 
• Community involvement: The company donated over 65 million servings of food through its Helping Hungry Homes program since 2008.

The new targets include:
• Animal care: Completing conversion to group housing systems for pregnant sows on U.S. company-owned farms by the end of 2017, and completing conversion to group housing systems for pregnant sows on U.S. contract farms and in joint ventures worldwide by 2022. 
• Employee safety: Achieve annual Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred (DART) results better than the general industry average.
• Environmental stewardship: Achieve 10 percent reduction in normalized water use and solid waste to landfill by 2020 and 5 percent reduction in normalized energy use and GHG emissions, from a 2014 baseline. 
• Community involvement: Each facility must participate in at least four community events per year, as well as maintain the company's ongoing Learners to Leaders and Helping Hungry Homes programs.

Website
Smithfield also announced it has launched a new corporate website, merging the previous smithfieldfoods.com and the company's sustainability website, smithfieldcommitments.com, which has been discontinued.
The new website includes video interviews with company executives and is organized around these three concepts: responsible operations, transparency, and innovation using the tagline “Good food. Responsibly.”

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