AUSTIN, Minn. – Hormel Foods Corporation has been added to the Maplecroft CII Benchmark, part of the Maplecroft Climate Innovation Indexes (CII), which evaluate corporate performance in climate-related innovation and carbon management. The benchmark is made up of the top 339 US-based companies of the 1,300 companies evaluated, including Hormel Foods, which ranks 126.

Corporate responsibility initiatives at Hormel that were evaluated as part of the Maplecroft CII Benchmark selection process include:

• The company’s global Environmental Management System, which integrates company environmental policies into the overall business strategy.
• The organizational learning strategy at Hormel Foods, which encourages and facilitates the flow and exchange of eco-ideas throughout the company.

The Maplecroft CIIs consider US stocks with a free-float market capitalization of more than $1 billion and each company is rated against more than 100 performance based criteria. These criteria include the capacity to generate innovative new technologies or initiatives that capitalize on climate-related market opportunities; the management of climate change through policies, disclosure, targets, verification and supply chain processes; the mitigation of carbon emissions; adaptation by modeling future climate impacts and changing company operations and strategy; and reductions in overall GHG emissions. This is the first reweighting of the indexes, which were initially launched on the Bloomberg Professional service in January 2010.

Several sustainability milestones have been achieved by Hormel Foods in 2010, including its recent addition to the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, being recognized on the Global 1000 Sustainable Performance Leaders ranking for 2009 by CRD Analytics, and the LEED Gold certification of its Progressive Processing LLC production facility in Dubuque, Iowa.