HyLife’s COVID-19 Response to Our Communities

HyLife is sending this information to provide reassurance during the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19. We take our obligation to our employees, our animals, our customers, and our communities seriously. As community partners, we rely on the trust of our communities and are working non-stop to find creative solutions to the problems presented by today’s current events.

As one of Canada’s leading pork producers, we have worked hard to create a culture of food safety that our customers can trust. Throughout our history, we have consistently operated under strict safety policies and procedures, along with effective biosecurity programs to protect against viruses. We plan to use these strong habits to develop the measures needed to keep everyone safe from COVID-19.

As an essential service, providing communities with food, our teams continue to fulfill our operational needs. We are committed to continuing to execute our business with excellence, creating premium pork products for the global market place that are safe and of the highest quality.

These measures began weeks ago as we continued to learn more about the outbreak, and we continue to evolve and adjust these measures to meet and protect the needs of our teams:

• We have set-up a COVID-19 Response Team, which is a combination of leaders from across the company who are dedicated to planning and implementing new preventative measures.
• We have contracted a Public Health expert to join our staff to provide science-based support to our employees and monitor and hold our teams accountable to the highest health standards.
• We have created a work from home plan for as many of our employees as possible and where it isn’t possible, we are taking extra precautions to make sure we are social distancing.
• We have continued to create new spaces at our processing plant site in Neepawa to continue to increase space available for employee breaks to help maximize social distance where possible.
• We are working on rearranging our shifts at the processing plant to have fewer people at the plant at a time, and also minimize interactions at shift changes to maximize social distance as much as possible.
• We have suspended all company travel.
• All employees are asked to cancel personal travel outside of their home countries, and we are working with our employees on a case-by-case basis to minimize the financial impact of canceling their personal travel.
• We require all employees who are returning from international travel to self-isolate for 14 days.
• We are assisting with the pick-up of employee’s friends and family from the airport to minimize. interactions with people who are traveling internationally.
• We have restricted all third parties from entering HyLife workplaces.
• We have eliminated in-person meetings unless required and are empowering our teams to use technology to facilitate as many of our peer-to-peer conversations.
• We are taking measures to minimize paper transactions across the company.
• We have placed extra cleaning in common areas.
• We are providing additional payments to employees who are required to stay home while ill or self-isolate as incentive to “do the right thing” and not feel pressured to come to work for financial reasons.

We are continuing to educate our staff through internal communications regularly with ongoing prevention messaging, details on self-isolation, and how to reach out for help when experiencing symptoms.

After the announcement on behalf of the Canadian government, we are pleased with the direction they’ve taken in recognizing the need to continue commerce between Canada/US border. We are happy to report that our transportation, distribution, exportation, and warehousing are working together to minimize any potential disruption to our supply chain. These factors have allowed us to continue to move forward with our business.

You can count on HyLife to do our best to execute our business with integrity maintaining operational stability, providing global food security and prioritizing the health of our employees, our animals  and the people living in our communities.

Grant Lazaruk
HyLife CEO