A Message from our Chief Sustainability Officer
The second installment of the new OSI Sustainability Quarterly Newsletter comes out during an important time at our company; the giving season. This is a special time for us because we get to witness the benefits of giving back and meeting the needs of our community firsthand. As food providers, the season of being together with family and friends is also our time to shine! We appreciate the power of eating together and celebrate the connections that can be made over food so we place a non-negotiable emphasis on our Food Safety Culture and celebrate the role that each one of us plays in that mission.That's why this newsletter includes some of our most recent highlights of food safety excellence and giving around our network.
At OSI, our social responsibility includes both our products and our people. We operate more than 60 facilities in 17 countries worldwide, and don’t take that trust lightly. Being involved in so many communities provides us the unique opportunity to give back and positively impact the lives of thousands of men, women and children, while aligning our social responsibility efforts with all of our core business values: integrity, partnership, teamwork, improvement and innovation.
This newsletter features stories about OSI and our partners all around the world. You will read about the recent activities of Food Safety Week across our global facilities, OSI Australia's Turosi Giving, which is providing employees and members opportunities to give back to their communities, how OSI North America is partnering with area food banks and hunger relief programs as a way to give back to the community and reduce food insecurity and how OSI’s Vista is communicating sustainability through action in India.
I hope you will not only enjoy reading these stories, but also feel proud and inspired by the incredible actions of the people who work at and with our company.
Happy Giving Season.
Best,
Nicole Johnson-Hoffman
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Food Safety Week was celebrated globally during September 2019. OSI’s manufacturing facilities and corporate offices around the world hosted fun and innovative activities to create food safety awareness, to strengthen food safety culture and to demonstrate commitment to food safety and quality.
This year’s activities focused on three specific topics: allergens, foreign material prevention and microorganisms, which are hazards that each plant diligently seeks to control during their operations. Each location hosted a Food Safety Fair and conducted celebration activities to build awareness and ensure everyone, from the shop floor to the corporate offices, felt that they had a role in making safe food for their families, for themselves and for our customers.
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Believe it or not, millions of Americans lack available financial resources to purchase food for their households. These households experience what is known as “food insecurity,” which according to the
USDA
, is defined as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active and healthy life. Around the world, food insecurity is an even bigger issue. With the global population rising, the food industry is looking for every opportunity to tackle this challenge. Sometimes that means innovating across our supply chain to produce more high quality food, but other times it means doing what we can as human beings to help those in our local communities that have fallen on hard times and need help from their neighbors.
Over the years, OSI has partnered with area food banks and hunger relief programs as a way to give back to the community and reduce food insecurity. Our employees have been instrumental in identifying opportunities and leading the way in community engagement. Many of these community engagements are done in partnership with some incredible organizations. By partnering with these organizations, we are able to multiply the positive impact we are having on people’s lives.
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Being in business in India for 23 years enables Vista Processed Foods, an OSI Group company, to have a deep and thorough understanding of the communities in which it operates and, perhaps more importantly, the greatest needs of those communities. With more than seven facilities and 200 employees throughout India, there is tremendous opportunity to make a positive impact on people’s lives. And by contributing to the community through action and support, Vista believes it is communicating its vision of sustainable growth to all employees and the people surrounding its plant locations.
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The giving season is a special time at OSI. We pride ourselves on being a company that works hard to instill a culture of giving as a central part of who we are. In fact, giving is one of the most important and fun things we do. From working with local food banks in the United States to partnering with the Clown Doctors in Australia, the culture of giving at OSI extends across our entire network. While OSI does focus on three priority areas relating to its giving, food research and education, health and nutrition and children and families, we also empower our employees to help drive many of our charitable causes.
We asked people from around our global network to weigh in on what it means to them to be a part of a company that makes such a big effort to give back to the community.
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Doing good benefits recipients, and, equally as important, the people doing the acts. That is one of the reasons OSI’s Australia company Turosi established Turosi Giving in 2011. Originally named Turi Trust, the organization was founded on the idea that giving back to the community was not only the moral, responsible thing to do. It was also good for the business as the employees would grow as individuals, become more connected to the communities in which they work and feel inspired knowing that the company they worked for put caring for the community at the forefront of its mission.
The organization is a proud example of how to produce real, impactful results through important partnerships within communities and renewed energy in the workplace. At the heart of the organization, and in line with OSI Group’s core values, is the desire to contribute to the community. Our communities and the people that live in them are an integral part of our business.
Stay tuned for an update on the Turosi Giving Gala Ball
taking place on October 12, 2019
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It is hard to imagine putting out a fire without confronting an actual fire. It is also not instinctual to know the first thing to do if someone falls from a ladder in a warehouse. Without experiencing these safety emergencies, appropriately preparing for such situations can be difficult: Would workers know the proper way to extinguish different types of fires? Would an injured person know not to try to stand and risk further injury? Would that person stay put and shout for help if they were bleeding, perhaps wasting precious time that professionals would use to fasten a tourniquet, or would they be aware of the proper course of action?
Preparing for real emergencies and crises that can arise in a workplace is a challenge, as it is hard to give guidance and recommendations to employees without seeing how they would actually behave in a given situation. Marta Torres from the Human Resources department at OSI Food Solutions Spain had these same concerns. So she did some digging and found an innovative way for her colleagues to prepare to turn what could be a potential disaster into just another day on the job.
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Sustainability Highlights From Orange Bay Foods
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As featured in this month's newsletter cover photo,
Orange Bay Foods, an OSI Group Company in Japan,
is a key supplier of high quality beef patties to
Japan's quick service restaurants.
Orange Bay Foods has been strategically targeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in their community engagement activities. Here are a few of their sustainability highlights from 2019.
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Orange Bay Foods provided hand washing lessons to an elementary and nursery school to promote food safety concepts. Students were issued Hand Wash Master cards to certify the students with good hand washing results at the end of lessons.
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Orange Bay Foods provided social education programs for 200 elementary school students during the summer break.
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Ocean Cleaning Volunteering
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Employees from Orange Bay Foods volunteered their time to help remove illegal sea dumping in the Spring.
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