Smithfield Foods wholly owns six international operations, consisting of four subsidiaries in Poland and Romania and two food distribution operations in the United Kingdom and Romania. Agri Plus is one of Poland’s largest hog producers and provides a substantial portion of its hogs to our Polish meat processing affiliate, Animex. In Romania, Smithfield Ferme raises hogs principally for the pork processor Smithfield Prod. Agroalim, a large food distributor in Romania, supplies meat produced at Smithfield Prod to the Romanian market.
Our hog-raising operations in Poland and Romania raised approximately 2.4 million market hogs in fiscal 2012. Our food processors in those countries produced more than 800,000 pounds of fresh pork and packaged meat products in the same period.
Our international operations1 follow the same systems for animal care, environmental management, and food safety as we do in the United States, and they are currently making efforts to implement our corporate employee health and safety standards globally. We have also developed new sustainability goals and targets, like those of our domestic operations, for our international operations. We will implement these during fiscal 2013.
In this section, we are including four years of data and other information about our wholly owned Polish and Romanian operations. Some highlights from our efforts in fiscal 2012 include the following:
- Improved overall energy use efficiency by 13 percent since 2008;
- Certified our Romanian processor to the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI);
- Provided 94 scholarships worth $62,000 to Polish students; and
- Planted more than 6,000 trees in 25 Romanian villages.
1 “International operations” refer to wholly owned Polish and Romanian operations specified in this section.
