The Grazing Mind

Send a balloon message to a colleague or satisfy your sweet tooth and purchase a scrumptious slice of pie served up by the Credit team.  Or, conduct an always useful spring car cleanse by heading to the back of the building to have your car washed to spotless perfection.

It’s all for a good cause folks, and there’s only one more day of CFS fundraising madness on tap!  Check back again tomorrow for updates on the “field games” – always a fan favorite.

Click here to learn more about our Community Food Share Corporate Challenge.

One of our local papers is getting in on the fun behind our CFS fundraising campaign this week. Check it out here…

We’ve got lots of stuff happening in the building today – Promotions is selling WhiteWave swag, Human Resources is offering “thank you balloons” for $1 each, a cupcake cart is making the rounds of each floor, our wine auction has kicked off and delicious homemade breakfast burritos sold out quickly this morning. And later this afternoon we’ll have a Tee Off to Fight Hunger putting competition.

Here’s to another day of great fundraising for an even greater cause!

Week two of the Community Food Share “Compete to Beat Hunger Corporate Challenge” is underway. Here are just a few of the creative ways our employees are pitching in to beat hunger. Quilt auction, bake sale, golf tournament, pie throwing contest, and chili cook-off. Stay tuned for more throughout the week…

In honor of Mother’s Day today, we wanted to share with you a little bit about how full-time mom and full-time Horizon Organic dairy farmer Jenneke DeJong balances five children and full-time organic dairy farming at her family’s 1,405-acre farm in Bonanza, Oregon.

Third-generation organic dairy farmers, Jenneke and her husband Arie don’t use pesticides or herbicides, and their dairy cows freely graze in the pasture and aren’t given hormones or antibiotics. Since 2004, they have been shipping organic milk to Horizon Organic.

All five of the family’s children help out on the farm, and Jenneke says they have all learned – and are still learning – to do every job, from feeding the calves and the cows, taking them out to pasture, helping with farm chores, and assisting with paperwork and bookkeeping and more.

Jenneke says this hands-on approach teaches her children a good work ethic and the most important values in life – integrity, honesty, teamwork, and problem-solving. “They grew up with the idea that everybody works together to get the job done, and get it done right,” she says. Jenneke thoroughly enjoys her job as a mother and an organic dairy farmer, and even more so, appreciates that she can share her livelihood with her family.

Happy Mother’s Day to Jenneke DeJong and all the other hardworking mother’s out there who inspire us daily.

Horizon Organic is currently accepting applications for the 2012 HOPE scholarship through next Friday, May 18.  Each year, the brand offers up to four $2,500 college scholarships to Horizon producers and their children or grandchildren who are working towards a degree in agriculture or large animal veterinary science that will later be used within the organic industry.

Horizon’s HOPE program has been around since 2001 with a focus on converting more dairy farm operations and their land to organic production and sustainable farm management practices. The HOPE scholarship is a natural extension of the brand’s efforts to nurture the future of the organic community and help build the next generation of organic dairy leaders.

For more information or to obtain the HOPE scholarship application packet, email producer@horizonorganic.com.

Best of luck to all 2012 applicants!  And stay tuned to the Grazing Mind because we’ll be updating you on the winners in a couple of months.

Having our headquarters based in Colorado, we of course like to get outside a lot. Especially when it comes to how we get to work. In fact last year, logged more than 11,700 miles biking to work.

And through vanpools and other ride-sharing programs, our employees were able to share more than 6,000 rides and cut monthly gas costs by over 50%!

What’s your preferred alternative way to get around? Biking, carpooling, snowshoeing?…

Today marks the start to our biggest annual fundraising event for Community Food Share (CFS), an organization very near and dear to our hearts here at WhiteWave.  While we give to them year round–in the form of volunteer hours, monetary and product donations–the Compete to Beat Hunger Corporate Challenge  is our one, dedicated annual fundraising event to help raise money for CFS and fight hunger in Broomfield and Boulder counties.

This week is simply dedicating to going online, and donating to the cause. But next week, now that’s when things get real. Chili cook-offs, pie in the face contests, poker tournaments; you name it, we got it. All in an effort to raise as much money as we possibly can. We’ll be documenting activities all next week here in TGM, so tune in often…

One of the most impactful highlights of my time at WhiteWave Foods was when we created and launched our company Mission and Values in 2007.  For someone who runs the communications function at a company, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity. Most companies I’d worked for prior to WhiteWave already had mission statements and corporate values that had existed decades prior to my arrival. To have a hand in creating these important words that direct what WhiteWave stands for and how it will do business was pivotal and incredibly exciting.

As you can imagine, since we launched our Mission – “We will be the Earth’s favorite food company” – the company has evaluated many of the ways it does business. Whether it’s setting aggressive goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, water usage and waste, lowering the amount of sugar in some of our products or developing new packaging that reduces the amount of material used, we’re not afraid to find better ways to work.

All of that said, many of us – including our most senior leaders – felt we could do more to help make our Mission and Values a reality.

Some of us were concerned that our Mission and Values were becoming less meaningful and that worried us.  So we set out on a quest to find out from employees if our concerns were warranted. Was our Mission clear and specific enough? Did our Values help guide our decision making? Were people bringing them to life in their day-to-day work?  We wanted all of our employees to contribute to, and help us shape, who WhiteWave is and what we are becoming.  If we did this well, the hope is that it would help create a company that people love and trust, and one that they are excited to come to work for every day.

We asked employees to take part in this work and we discovered that they were eager to provide greater clarity about what our Mission and Values mean and how everyone here could apply them to their work.  After all, we want these words to guide our behavior – not just take up space on a wallet card or a sign on the wall.

As a result of employee input, we refined our Values. In fact, we added two new Values that employees felt strongly needed to exist – “Share What We Do Well” and “Individuals Matter.”

Since re-launching our Mission and unveiling our newly-evolved Values in January, we’ve hosted workshops with every functional group at WhiteWave designed to drive greater engagement in what those important words mean.  All of this is one of the big benefits of working at a young company. Each of us has a say in what we can and will become in the future. I’m proud to work for a company that is courageous enough to take a look at itself, and involve its employees in what it stands for. When people ask me how long I’ve been here and I tell them almost 10 years, they ask what’s kept me at WhiteWave so long. It’s work like this.  Who wouldn’t want an opportunity to make an impact and help shape a company’s future?

I completely dig that.

With increased consumer demand for organic milk and high feed costs still affecting farmers, our Horizon Organic brand announced today that it will be extending a short-term market adjustment premium (MAP) for its more than 600 family farmers. The temporary MAP extension will further help our farmers, who continue to face high costs on their organic dairy farms.

Click here to read more…