25 Mar 2020
Like you, we are deeply concerned by the far-reaching consequences of the Coronavirus for the health and livelihoods of people around the world. We are taking steps to protect our people and community, and to support you and the broader food system during this unprecedented crisis.
Protecting People
Our priority is to protect our people and their families, our customers and business partners, and the broader community. As such, we have implemented the hygiene and social distancing measures recommended by the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Events and travel have been cancelled, access to our sites is restricted to critical activity, and all people who can are working remotely. Temperature checking protocols are being deployed this week. We have increased cleaning and changed our operational procedures to limit contact between people.
We are supporting our people in line with our values. Employees have access to sick pay if they or a family member becomes ill or needs to be absent from work. For anyone who is infected by the coronavirus, or whose domestic partner or dependents are, we have established a fund of weeks of paid time-off to provide for those who do not have access to other benefits when they are not be able to work. We are enacting flexible working policies to enable people to work around dependent care arrangements while schools are closed in large parts of the country.
Protecting Supply
We recognize the significant responsibility we have to you and to the wider food system to maintain supply. We have taken and are taking further measures to enable our supply chain to continue to be effective during this period of disruption. Several weeks ago, we increased our inventories of critical and high demand products. We are cross-training people within our organization to take on critical roles within our operations should this become necessary.
We are digitalizing our service offerings to make our expertise available where needed. Our Application Specialists, those people with plant operational experience, will be available remotely using video technology to support you with trouble shooting in a period where you may have skills gaps. We have seen a shift in the market to packaged goods, and we are making our Technical Advisors available remotely to work on formulation challenges that the situation may have thrown up for you.
Through this period of disruption, our aim is the same as it always is: to help you, our customer, succeed with your business. We know this may mean different things for different people, but we are committed to supporting our customers today as we have done for the last 100 years. Your sales representative and normal Puratos contacts continue to be at your disposal. We will continue to update our webpage with developments.
We wish you, your colleagues and families the very best in this challenging time.
Kind regards,
Andrew Brimacombe
President – Puratos USA
