The Grazing Mind

As many of you know, WhiteWave Foods has been a longtime supporter of Community Food Share (CFS), our local food bank and member of Feeding America. Community Food Share’s 25^th annual “Hunger Hurts the Whole Community” food drive takes place March 20-31 and if you live in the Boulder/Denver area, they need your help.

CFS is looking for friendly grocery store greeters to hand out bags and remind shoppers to donate food.  Shifts usually last two hours and greeters are needed in most of the grocery stores in Longmont, Lafayette and Louisville, Colorado. Just two hours of your valuable volunteer time can easily generate more than 200 pounds of food, which is enough food to feed a family of four for two weeks.

CFS has discovered that when it has greeters to engage people at the store, donations rise significantly. We have a group of WhiteWave employees already signed up to help our local food bank, and you can help too. Please consider volunteering as a store greeter – this can be a great family experience that can help the whole community!

Interested?  Contact Sue Ericson at sericson@communityfoodshare.org  or 303.652.3663 x202

Thanks for helping us help those in need in our local community.

At WhiteWave Foods, being involved in our communities and treading lightly on the environment are important to our team members.

Values in Action (VIA) is our employee program that promotes volunteerism, community involvement, and environmental events and initiatives. Employees can log VIA points when they do things like volunteer, carpool to work and even use the stairs instead of the elevators (and we all know stair climbing is good for the quads). When all of the VIA points are collected at the end of each year, our employees are rewarded with prizes such as gift cards to our delicious Wave Café. A couple of lucky dogs even went home recently with iPad Minis.

One of our core values that helps guide us in our daily work is “Share What We Do Well.”  This value inspires us to find innovative ways to make a difference in our local communities. We’re proud to report that in 2012, WhiteWave employees volunteered more than 13,500 hours (that’s 562 days!) supporting a variety of non-profit and industry organizations such as Community Food Share (CFS), which is part of the national Feeding America network. In fact, during our annual Impact Day, WhiteWave employees provided close to 1,100 hours of service in just one day – serving more than 200 families and organizing more than 12,000 pounds of food at our local food banks.

A few months into this new year, and we’re busy working towards beating our 2012 VIA goals and continuing to make a positive impact in our local communities. Check back later in the year to see our progress.

Over the weekend, WhiteWave and our brands were honored to receive the “Good to Grow” and “Roots and Shoots” awards from Growing Gardens, a Boulder nonprofit organization whose mission is to “enrich the lives of our community through sustainable urban agriculture.”

Since 2000, we’ve supported Growing Gardens (mostly with a lot of weeding!) because we saw the promise in their efforts to educate people about growing their own food and making good food choices.

One of our core values that helps guide everything we do is “Share What We Do Well.”  This value inspires us to find new and innovative ways to make a difference in our local communities, and we couldn’t live it without partners like Growing Gardens who provide us with opportunities give back.

Click here to learn more about how you can volunteer at or support Growing Gardens.

Mandy McMichen, Attention Homes Volunteer of the Month

If you follow this blog, you know that as an organization we take community outreach and volunteerism pretty seriously. It’s integrated into our culture, our day-to-day job responsibilities, and even our personal annual objectives. And as part of those efforts, everyone is also encouraged to match the volunteer hours they give on company time, with the same amount of volunteer hours on personal time outside of work. It’s more of a recommendation than anything; there’s no policy that requires the time match. But you’d probably be surprised to see how many people actually meet that match.

There’s definitely no shortage of stories worth sharing in that regard, but one in particular stood out this month, as WhiteWave employee Mandy McMichen was recognized as Volunteer of the Month by Attention Homes, a non-profit organization dedicated to serving at-risk youth in the area.

According to Attention Homes, “Mandy always looks for something to do and someone to help. No stone is unturned and certainly no cooking pot left unfilled!”

Mandy shared her thoughts on her experiences in the Attention Homes newsletter, check ‘em out below, and congrats to Mandy!

AH: Why do you donate your time and efforts to Attention Homes?

MM: I work at WhiteWave Foods. Our President Blaine McPeak, recently implemented “Impact Day”, a day that our offices close after lunch and employees are sent out into the community to volunteer. He asks each employee to match those volunteer hours with personal time to really make an “impact” in our community. I loved the idea, but had no idea where I would volunteer my time. I learned that WhiteWave sponsors Attention Homes’ Kaleidoscope event and after reading more about it online, I knew it was just what I was looking for.

AH: How does your donation affect you and your life?

MM: Cooking healthy food for Attention Homes’ kids is such fun! They seem to really enjoy the food and often come in to chat or help me. I am becoming a familiar face around the house. I enjoy both listening and talking with the kids – I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel! Attention Homes is such an amazing organization. I am so proud to be a part of it. I’m doubly blessed to have the opportunity to work for a company like WhiteWave Foods that encourages all of us to give more of ourselves to our communities!

It’s been a wicked hot summer here in Colorado, and to beat the heat we decided to cool down the old fashion way… by throwing pies at each other.

Just kidding. The pie in the face fun was actually part of a fundraising event for our friends at Community Food Share. Employees here in Broomfield got to buy raffle tickets for a chance to pop an executive in the face with a pie.

Overall we raised more than $2,000 which is equal to 8,000 meals.

Check out some highlights from the fun below. And let us know in the comments – If you could pick anyone in the world to hit in the face with a pie, who would it be?

Starting a new job is always exciting. It’s a fresh start with new people, new experiences and of course, new employee orientation. The orientation process has actually come a long way, and a lot of companies do some really cool things to keep the on-boarding fun and engaging. Here at WhiteWave, we’ve incorporated a volunteer event to go along with the on-boarding process as a way to show our new folks how important community is to the organization. It’s also a great opportunity to expose new people to our Values, most notably the one that states, “Share What We Do Well”. Just last week a crew of new employees got to spend half of their orientation day at Community Food Share. Check out some of the highlights below:

For decades companies have been rewarding employees for meeting or exceeding their standard day-to-day work objectives (like getting to work on time, meeting quarterly numbers and objectives, etc.). But what about the stuff that goes on outside the normal day-to-day work flow? The things that aren’t commonly tied to business objectives (like volunteering, finding more sustainable business processes, or even recommending new products)? Plenty of companies are really good at doing these extra things, but the activities aren’t necessarily tied to overall business goals.

At WhiteWave, we’re trying to change that by reframing how we measure success when it’s time to reward employees at the end of the year. It’s definitely an evolving process that’ll take time to perfect, but by integrating social responsibility and traditional business objectives into the same bucket, we’re focused on working to make corporate citizenship just as important as our business results.

And according to this recent article from Fast Company, we’re part of a growing number of companies that are integrating this kind citizenship into their business, and helping redefine what “success” looks like at the end of the year…

We hosted a pretty amazing field day to close our Community Food Share Corporate Challenge yesterday. And with the help of some food trucks, kickball, oversized trikes and sumo wrestling, we really had a blast. See some quick highlights via the video below, and stay tuned for final results and full recap later next week.

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…