Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
Diversity and inclusion are core values within Campbell Soup Company, and we recognize the need for these values to be a mainstay within our overall strategic objectives. Our company's position on diversity was best described by our CEO, Doug Conant, who has observed, "To help us effectively grow our business, I believe we must have a workforce that reflects and best understands our increasingly diverse consumers. As a consumer food company, we simply don't believe that we can effectively create and market products for an increasingly diverse world, if we are not effectively attracting, developing and retaining a diverse cadre of employees representative of that world."
Jennifer Nocito and Martin Reid attend a newcomers reception at Campbell's Global Leadership Team meeting.
Campbell's diversity and inclusion strategy is focused on five specific goals:
- Firmly establishing leadership support and accountability
- Linking diversity and inclusion to performance management
- Integrating diversity and inclusion into talent management
- Building diversity and inclusion into business practices
- Educating and training to advance diversity and inclusion
Campbell has developed a diversity and inclusion scorecard to benchmark progress in the areas of recruitment, development and retention. We believe that representation, while important, only lays the foundation for creating a dynamically diverse and inclusive environment. While the company continues to measure diversity quantitatively, we have also taken steps to measure qualitative factors such as involvement of senior leaders, support of affinity networks, employee engagement and business integration. We are moving beyond the data to better understand where the gaps exist and to transform the culture of our organization. Today, the company has an overall representation of 50 percent women and 34 percent people of color. We have seen an eight percent increase in representation of women at the executive officer level, as well as an increase of six percent in people of color within the executive officer ranks. We continue to be challenged with regard to retention of diverse employees at lower levels of management. This issue will continue to be a priority across our organization. To raise organizational awareness, more than 1,500 managers, 500 individual contributors and 300 plant employees in the U.S. attended diversity and inclusion training sessions in 2008.
Campbell has expanded our minority-owned supplier base to work with firms like SHI, an IT equipment supplier, owned by Thai Lee.
Supplier Diversity
In addition to our consistent focus on internal diversity and inclusion, Campbell strongly believes that creating relationships with minority and women-owned businesses is vital to the company's overall success. When our procurement team launched Campbell's Supplier Diversity Program in 2006, they had a three-pronged mission: to grow our diverse supplier base by assuring equal access to suppliers interested in doing business with Campbell; to strengthen our supplier base through broader inclusion of diverse vendors; and to ensure that our supplier base better reflects the markets we serve. In 2006 Campbell spent $91 million with diverse suppliers. In 2007 the goal was $121 million, but the actual spend with diverse suppliers was $129 million. In 2008 our spending goal for diverse suppliers is $136 million. This is part of our total procurement spending for the year, which is estimated to be $4.2 billion.
