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Letter from the CEO

Welcome

Our corporate responsibility report outlines our efforts in the areas of people, process, products, performance and philanthropy.

Thank you for your interest in the corporate responsibility efforts at Hormel Foods. This is our second full report on this subject. Our efforts and our reporting on those efforts continue to evolve, and we hope you agree that both have become more comprehensive and effective.

This year, we are proud to include data from our 41 U.S. manufacturing facilities. Our reporting now aligns more closely with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the internationally recognized standard for responsibility reporting.

We also are pleased to bring this information to you in an enhanced digital format. While we will continue to print an executive summary, our focus will be on Web-based reporting, which we believe has several advantages — environmental-friendliness, ease of finding information and interactivity.

We continue, however, to report through the prism of Our Way — our corporate values structure — as embodied in people, process, products, performance, and philanthropy.

We are proud to share information you will find in this report; for example:

• We continue to take a leadership role in fighting hunger, which includes fielding our third-annual Hormel Hunger Survey and donating more than $1 million in product and funds to the effort.
• We have rolled out an inclusion training program to employees that goes beyond race and gender to illustrate all the ways in which we are going above and beyond in this regard.

We also report on challenges that we face:

• Reducing water usage as well as waste and energy consumption are ongoing areas of focus. We established clear goals and are committed to achieving them. This year, we are setting new goals for air emissions and will share our progress next year.
• Animal handling is another area of focus, and in this report we describe ongoing efforts with industry organizations and suppliers to ensure animal welfare.

Making progress on these fronts is not easy, but our culture built around doing the right thing is paying dividends.

I am excited by the collaborative spirit and enthusiasm of our employees, who are focused on clear goals and applying the innovative spirit at Hormel Foods to these tasks. For instance, in our flagship facility in Austin, MN, we reached our five-year goal for water reduction in under one year. While that is a stellar example, we are making steady progress toward achieving these types of goals company-wide.

Our employees are to be commended for the progress they have achieved toward these efforts in the last two years. However, we know that making further gains will require greater effort, including aligning efforts in our 41 U.S. manufacturing facilities — a complex task, but one that we are committed to.

While we maintain our focus, we also must recognize these issues are being tackled amid a challenging economic environment. These challenges have not deterred us from our commitments, however. Indeed, we will continue to take steps to improve our performance against our goals, whether it be operating more efficiently, reducing waste or playing a leadership role in promoting the industry’s animal handling standards.

I hope you enjoy reading about how we have achieved our successes and are working to meet our challenges. Please take the time to share your thoughts.

Regards,

Jeffrey M Ettinger

Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer