Maple Leaf Foods releases 2020 sustainability report

Maple Leaf Foods, Inc., has released its 2020 Sustainability Report, highlighting the company’s key initiatives, milestones and accomplishments in 2020 on its journey to become the one of world’s most sustainable protein companies.

Sustainability at Maple Leaf Foods encompasses four pillars: better food, better care, better communities and better planet.

“Producing food took on an even deeper meaning as our disrupted nation needed nourishment. Never have I been more grateful that Maple Leaf Foods has a robust and mature sustainability program in place focused on delivering better food, better care, better communities and a better planet,” said Michael McCain, president and CEO. “Together, these sustainability commitments have been like a compass guiding us in our response to 2020’s remarkable events, keeping us focused on the vision and values that make us Maple Leaf Foods.”

In 2020, Maple Foods expanded its Raised Without Antibiotics (RWA) Greenfield portfolio to include Family Lunch Kits.

Maple Leaf Foods also made progress toward building its world-class animal care program. By the end of 2020, the company transitioned 87 per cent of its sow spaces to its Advanced Open Sow Housing system and installed environmental enrichments such as non-destructible toys in all Advanced Open Sow Housing sow, nursery, and growing pig barns. The company also added five climate-controlled poultry trailers to its Alberta fleet, and introduced SafeFlight real-time poultry digital trailer environmental monitoring across its Alberta operations and expanded implementation in its Ontario operations.

On November 7, 2020, Maple Leaf Foods marked one year as the world’s first major carbon neutral food company and the first food company in Canada to set science-based targets. By the end of 2020, the company had reduced the intensity of its environmental footprint by: 25.9 per cent for electricity, 19.5 per cent for natural gas, 21.6 per cent for water (2014 baseline); 12.1 per cent for solid waste (2015 baseline) and 30.9 per cent for food loss waste (2016 baseline). It also diverted 91.6 per cent of waste that would ordinarily go to landfills.

Maple Leaf Foods also became part of the first Sustainability-Linked Loan in Canada, a partnership with nine global banks where the company will benefit from lower interest rates upon achievement of certain sustainability targets and maintaining its carbon neutral status. The company also established an internal ‘price on carbon’ that provides input into all capital decisions and a carbon calculator tool to factor the carbon cost into all capital expenditure requests and return on net asset calculations. Further, the company finalized efforts to reduce plastic waste through its sustainable packaging strategy and launched its Prepped and Ready portfolio packaging with Halopack, an eco-friendly solution.