Scoular knows that its greatest asset are the people that support our business, whether they be employees, customers or the members of the communities around the world in which our employees live and work. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded at the start of 2020, Scoular quickly came together across the company, aligning our response with our core values and our business strategy to ensure we acted with compassion and perseverance, while leveraging best in class safety practices to protect our employees, our customers and our communities. We also took several other critical and proactive actions, and will continue to do so as we thoughtfully navigate the ongoing disruption of COVID-19 and support the success of Scoular and its many stakeholders. 

To support our employees, we have used employee safety as our North Star in all COVID-19 response planning. For our non-facility locations, and early in the pandemic, we swiftly pivoted to a work from home environment. We concurrently implemented employee support programs, including paid leave, crisis pay, a mental wellness program and work flexibility to support our employees’ various personal needs. In addition, we undertook the implementation of robust employee education programs on best practices for reducing COVID-19 transmission, as well as phased business travel and other work restrictions. Beyond its individual employee practices, Scoular implemented office and facility management processes to mitigate exposure risks, which included distribution of upgraded personal protective equipment and COVID-19 focused processes for disinfecting offices and facilities. To continue to ensure the support and connectivity of our employees, and at the start of 2020, we also implemented a company-wide, weekly employee communications stream, focusing on a variety of themes, including employee safety, best practices in limiting transmission, employee wellness and the company’s gratitude for the strong commitment of its workforce. 

To support our customers, Scoular swiftly created and implemented a variety of COVID-19 related facility and third-party policies, focusing on ensuring safety and continued customer service levels at our facility locations. We also leveraged various external communications workstreams for customers, vendors, producers and other partners to thoughtfully ensure they had critical business information and that their business needs were being met. As our employees pivoted to a work from home environment, and continued to support our customers in their diverse needs, we ensured that employees had the right technology and decision-making authority to ensure customer needs could be met in a work from home environment. Scoular, our leadership and our subject matter experts remain engaged in proactive and continued monitoring across the industry for impact to our customer and business partner groups to proactively assess and mitigate business impact. 

To support our communities, The Scoular Foundation engaged early and closely with key community partners, making contributions to critical emergency relief non-profits. In addition, the segment of our Canada-based Food Division made additional charitable contributions to support regional support organizations. Other community support efforts including donating surplus of masks to front line medical personnel and ongoing donations to various organizations in the communities where our employees live and work. Finally, and with emphasis on our company value of compassion, we have made our community giving efforts a point of focus in our employee communications stream, providing employees with ideas and resources on how they might have individual community impact during the pandemic.

As we continue to navigate the worldwide disruption of COVID-19, and its impacts on so many, we will always first consider the impact to our many stakeholders, with safety being our guiding focus. We recognize that assessments of the pandemic, perspectives on related disruption and the resulting economic realties are changing rapidly. Separately, we acknowledge that our company’s agility and the future environment will create new opportunity and the potential for acceleration of our sustainability strategies. As we look to our fiscal year end in May 2021, and our subsequent sustainability reporting that will provide greater external visibility on our progress in Fiscal Year 2021 and beyond, we will look forward to providing an update on the many positive steps we continue to take to navigate the pandemic and the impact that resulted for Scoular, our employees and our many partners.