To learn more about what we feed our animals, I encourage you to check out our “Feeding Our Hogs” video. It will give you an in-depth explanation about our entire feed process.

As to questions about “Food, Inc.,” the movie is filled with harmful myths about the U.S.food industry and Smithfield Foods and makes us out to be evil and sinister. Much of what is said about our company is simply untrue. The modern meat industry is a marvel. Smithfield strives to feed the world in a socially responsible manner. Yes, it’s hard work, but our workers are very proud of what they do to produce safe, wholesome food for dinner tables around the world. 

If you are interested in the other side of the story, our company has developed responsible programs to protect the health of our animals, the safety of our employees and the quality of the food we produce. These programs are highlighted on this site and our YouTube channel. We are committed to protecting our employees’ health and safety, and we strive to create a fair and ethical workplace.  We provide good jobs that require solid skills and hard work. In terms of our animals, we have three goals when it comes to their care: for them to be safe, comfortable and healthy. And that commitment, in turn, promotes the production of safe, high-quality food.

If you were to visit the many communities where we operate, you’d find that the majority of our neighbors like having us there. That’s because we’ve shown them that we take our responsibilities very seriously, and we provide a source of income in communities where employment opportunities are scarce. We feel we have a moral obligation to be the best possible corporate citizen. If you would like information about particular claims made in the movie, please send us an email at csr@smithfieldfoods.com.

—Dennis H. Treacy, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Chief Sustainability Officer

Thank you for reaching out to us. It is definitely important to maintain a balanced, healthy diet every day, but meat plays an important role in achieving just that. It offers valuable nutrients including protein, iron, and zinc as well as B vitamins and essential fatty acids that are difficult to compensate for with non-meat alternatives. That's why meat is included as an important part of the new "Food Plate" that recently replaced the traditional food pyramid. At Smithfield, we are constantly striving to improve our processes and become more resource-efficient. We’ve come quite a long way but we truly believe there is always further progress to be made. Feel free to ask us more about our sustainable practices or you can also browse how we’re becoming a better environmental partner here.

—Dennis H. Treacy, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Chief Sustainability Officer

We have led the U.S. Pork industry by switching to a procedure known as CO2 anesthetizing. This process allows the pigs to move slowly and in small groups, which reduces stress for animals and their handlers.    

—Dennis H. Treacy, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Chief Sustainability Officer

Finding the right balance between all the factors you mention is a hard task, and a struggle that every business wrestles with. The good thing is that our social responsibility programs actually save us money--through operational efficiencies, energy savings, employee retention, healthier animals, and other advantages inherent to simply doing what's right.   

—Dennis H. Treacy, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Chief Sustainability Officer

As a general rule, we’ve found that any food that includes both salt and fat is going to be incredibly delicious. But in bacon’s case, to find out why it’s so good we need to talk chemistry. Basically, when amino acids and sugars live side by side and you apply heat to them, it causes a chemical reaction that has been dubbed the “Maillard reaction.” It’s what causes meat to turn brown as you heat it. One of the nifty side effects of this reaction is that it not only changes the color of the meat, but changes the flavor as well, giving it the savory taste we all love. So next time you’re enjoying a slice of bacon, make sure to think of Louis-Camille Maillard, who was the first to study this wonderful phenomenon in the early 1900s.

—Kathleen Kirkham, Sustainability Coordinator

Thanks for your question. You can find our response to the HSUS SEC filing at smithfieldcommitments.com/whats-happening-now.

—Dennis H. Treacy, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Chief Sustainability Officer

When we first set the targets, we thought they were a stretch because we had already achieved improvements over recent years. But once our teams focused on meeting them, we witnessed progress that was much faster than we had anticipated. We plan to watch our continued progress for another year and then will evaluate whether to set new targets ahead of 2016. Our numbers tend to fluctuate from one year to the next, so we can’t automatically assume that the second year of our sustainability management program will see the same strong results.

—Dennis H. Treacy, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Chief Sustainability Officer

We first announced the phase-out plan in January 2007, with a goal of completion within 10 years. Not long after our announcement, the economy took a nosedive. That forced us to delay our conversion work. However, in September 2010, we announced that capital expenditures for the phase-out had restarted. We now expect to have 30 percent of all company-owned sow housing converted to group stalls by December 2011, and we will continue to update our progress on this Web site and in future CSR reports.

—Dennis H. Treacy, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Chief Sustainability Officer

For many years now, our management focus has been on improving our energy efficiency and reducing energy use, and we have reported on our performance in both categories. At the request of several nongovernmental stakeholder groups, we now specifically highlight our GHG reductions and better explain that these reductions are related to our overall energy reduction target—10 percent reduction (normalized) over 2008 by fiscal 2016. Smithfield also participated this past year in an industry study that analyzed the carbon footprint of pork.

—Dennis H. Treacy, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Chief Sustainability Officer

We immediately took action and sent in a team, which included renowned animal handling experts and state officials. They reviewed the film and had free access to all the farms. In the end, the team confirmed that our program is robust and made recommendations such as how to improve our employee training and other suggestions, which we are currently implementing. As to the episodes of abuse depicted on the film, we fired three individuals. All of this demonstrates again that we have a zero-tolerance policy for willful neglect or abuse of our animals. We condemn any instances of willful animal abuse, but we believe these episodes were isolated incidents.

—Dennis H. Treacy, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, and Chief Sustainability Officer