ConAgra Foods - Investor Relations

ConAgra Foods needs water for its facilities to produce safe, quality food, and to use in cooking, sanitation and other infrastructure systems. It’s a resource that allows us to operate our facilities and ensure our equipment gets cleaned thoroughly each day to meet food safety standards. In April 2010, we announced a goal to reduce water use by 15 percent per pound of product produced by 2015. We track water use for all of our facilities—both total amount used and water use per pound of finished product produced—and use this information to help prioritize water efficiency projects.

We believe the quality of the water we discharge is just as important as the amount of water we use. We have placed significant focus on improving wastewater pretreatment—including more than $30 million in recent infrastructure improvements—to drastically improve discharge water quality. We discharge wastewater to publicly owned treatment facilities for land application or irrigation or, in a few instances, we directly discharge wastewater into surface water bodies. With 37 percent of our wastewater used for irrigation or soil amendment at neighboring farms, we’re returning, through beneficial re-use, a significant amount of the water we've extracted.

Understanding our Water Risk
We have recently begun assessing business risk associated with the availability of clean water. As a first step, we have mapped our manufacturing operations using the World Business Counsel for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) Water Tool to identify facilities located in water-stressed regions. Based on 2025 projections, most of our plants (88 percent) are located in areas with adequate water supply, including 77 percent that are located in areas of abundant water.

Furthermore, when considering our manufacturing footprint in terms of water withdrawal, 86 percent of our total water use is coming from areas of low water stress based on the WBCSD’s Mean Annual Relative Water Stress Index. Just two sites representing less than one percent of our total water withdrawal are located in water scarce areas.

It is clear from our initial analysis that water risk is specific to individual locations, based on the supply and quality of local watersheds. Furthermore, water risk is not limited to our own facilities as most of our products’ water footprint is embedded in our supply chain. The World Resources Institute estimates that agriculture accounts for more than 70 percent of global water withdrawals. Therefore, water risk for our agricultural suppliers has the potential to increase our cost of ingredients and is one driver for our sustainable agriculture initiatives.

Wastewater standards may also become increasingly stringent, requiring more pretreatment at both our own and suppliers’ facilities. Like any business, we are exposed to water-related physical risk—such as droughts and floods—that are unpredictable and vary in severity season-to-season and region-to-region. We will continue to assess water-related risk and implement mitigation and adaptive strategies.

Twister® Fries Water Conservation
In most cases, water is used to float raw potatoes through the initial stages of the French fry making process, including cleaning and cutting. ConAgra Foods’ Lamb Weston plant in Boardman, Ore., made simple modifications to its water tanks and piping to improve the water efficiency of its Twister® fry production.

By adjusting tank overflows and product transfer loops, integrating overflow pipelines and installing tank dividers to balance water levels between tanks, Lamb Weston conserved 212,000 gallons per day—totaling 25 million gallons annually. The enhanced process reduced water spills, while improving sanitation and overall plant safety.

The Juicy Truth: Tomato Water Reclamation
Our tomato fresh-pack facility in Helm, Calif., processes between 4,000 tons and 5,000 tons of raw tomatoes each day in the summer during tomato season. Located in one of the largest agricultural counties in California, where water is becoming increasingly scarce, the site is provided with a limited supply of water from the local irrigation district.

To address this challenge, the facility has revamped the tomato-paste making process to use water removed from tomatoes to supply boilers, cooling towers and tanks, drastically reducing the need for fresh water for processing. Water is re-circulated up to three times before it is discharged and used as agricultural irrigation.

Each day during fresh-pack season, 4,000 to 5,000 tons of raw tomatoes yield approximately 39,000 gallons of usable water an hour, conserving nearly 56 million gallons of fresh water annually.