Responding to climate change

The impacts of climate change are already affecting us. For example, unpredictable weather patterns caused by rising global temperatures can affect our supplies of raw materials. Extreme weather, including ice and snow, floods, and tornados, have directly disrupted our operations, and wildfires and droughts in California have created water shortages. We have successfully managed disruptions without impacting our customers, yet we are expecting and preparing for an increase in the frequency and severity of such events.

Reducing our carbon footprint

We are constantly measuring and managing our environmental outputs to reduce our footprint. We set internal reduction targets in line with our ISO14001:2015 certification. 

We have already replaced all lighting with energy-efficient LED lights throughout our sites, three-quarters of which work on a timer system.

At the Evansville plant, we have reduced our internal shuttle track miles by over 90% by optimizing our supply chain while operational changes and other energy efficiency initiatives have resulted in further reductions in energy use.

We endeavor to continue minimizing our carbon footprint and we use third-party platforms such as EcoVadis and ISO14001:2015 to guide our activities, report and reduce.

Our facilities are strategically located close to our customer base and the region of many of our primary sourced ingredients, including rice. We continue to explore ways to reduce transport miles and associated emissions and monitor the emissions from our transport and third-party logistics.

We’re planning for what’s next, starting with gathering all the information needed to identify precisely what our current footprint is and working with our suppliers so that we can understand emissions across our whole value chain. We are evaluating solar infrastructure options to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels for power and working with our utility companies to understand the fuel mix of the energy they supply us so that we can track improvements in the future.

Preparing for the future

Our ISO14001:2015 certification gives us a good foundation in sound environmental management including mitigating our impact on climate. We are also focused on adapting to the impact climate change has on us, particularly our physical operations. As part of our business continuity planning, we review our operations daily and provide dashboards for our employees to track and improve our resource efficiency.  We have a climate-risk map built into our business models to prepare for the disruption that climate change is bringing through the frequency of severe weather events and changing weather patterns.