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Health and safety

We are working to enhance health and safety culture across our business every day.

Our approach

At Almarai, we are committed to creating safe and healthy workplaces for our employees and interested parties. We strive to ensure that our operations are conducted in a manner that protects the safety and health of our people, the environment, and the community. Our Occupational Health and Safety Management System is designed to deliver our intent to proactively prevent work related injuries, illnesses and minimize mental health incidents amongst our employees and interested parties. We have three core components that make up our approach to cultivating a safety culture: 'Safe Person, Safe Place, and Safe Practice Strategy'. This strategy is owned by everyone within the Almarai community and is regularly updated by our Corporate Health, Safety and Security Forum. This forum is responsible for ensuring that our standards and guidelines are being met, and they play a major role in implementing our strategy across all our business units. They are also key stakeholders in maintaining our high standards of safety for both people and the environment, as well as providing regular and continual training where applicable to enhance competencies across all facets, levels, and functions of our organization.

While managing our safety processes, we are also developing an occupational health and wellbeing program for our employees. This program will include training on a variety of mental health issues such as being able to identify early sign and symptoms of mental health along with prevention strategies using a variety of training resources digitally. Employees will be able to take part in awareness campaigns and events to improve health, safety, and wellbeing. The program will also provide access to health and safety professionals who can provide advice and guidance on a range of topics. We are also exploring ways to integrate technology into the program to make it more accessible and engaging for our employees. This will include virtual reality simulations, online courses, and interactive tools to help employees learn about safety topics in an enjoyable and engaging manner. We are committed to providing our employees with the resources they need to stay safe and healthy while at work.

To track and analyze health, safety, and security incidents, we have an incident reporting system which is accessible to all employees. Our incident reporting system enables us to prevent and manage incidents more effectively by allowing our workers and interested parties to report near misses, unsafe acts, and unsafe conditions by doing this it allows us to track and analyze the data to identify potential trends and issues, so that evidence-based decisions can be made, along with the development of fit for purpose interventions, preventing incidents from reoccurring. Additionally, it allows us to monitor the effectiveness of our control measures implemented, so that we can make adjustments as needed. This system helps us ensure that our employees and interested parties are safe, healthy, and secure in their working environment.

2022 performance and initiatives

Our occupational mobile health unit is just one of the many ways we are working towards our goal of providing an accessible occupational health and wellbeing program for all employees by 2025. Since 2020, we have continued to implement additional health and safety measures to ensure the physical, emotional, and economic wellbeing of our employees. We also made sure that our operations were safe, healthy, and secure to allow our business to continue operating in a sustainable manner. The COVID pandemic has made it clear that health and safety systems must be robust and efficient. To ensure that we ares maintaining the highest possible standards, we are constantly evaluating and updating our policies and procedures.

The Almarai Leadership team is publicly committed to promoting a health & safety culture. We have been working to maintain our ISO 45001 certification across our poultry and dairy farming and supply chain operations. We are also working aggressively to certify our manufacturing sites to ISO 45001. This certification facilitates the implementation of best practices across all our operations and our strategic sustainability target is to achieve the certification across 100% of our sites by 2025. To further promote a safe and healthy work environment, and as a part of our occupational health and wellbeing program, we have rolled out health screenings program.

Technology can play an important role in helping us to manage and mitigate risks, promote best practice, and make training more accessible. In 2022, Almarai continued to invest in digitalization projects to ensure that our employees have access to the best resources available. We expanded out a near miss reporting web form that allows employees to easily report near misses, unsafe acts, and unsafe conditions. We also have an online incident reporting system which runs on the cloud that can be accessed by all employees using a smartphone, and digital awareness channels and events to ensure that everyone is always up to date with the latest health & safety information. These digital systems are essential in helping Almarai to achieve our sustainability goals.

Our highlight stories

Fire risk

As part of our approach to managing our biggest risks, we have developed a corporate fire risk strategy that focuses on prevention, protection, evacuation, and business continuity planning.

Occupational health and wellbeing

As a part of our occupational health and wellbeing program, Almarai conducted anonymous surveys on health and wellbeing checks, and worked in collaboration with Saudi National Centre for Mental Health to raise awareness of health and wellbeing among employees.

Management of road risks

As a part of cultivating a road safety culture, Almarai has developed defensive driver training programs, installed inward & outward facing cameras, using black box technology to monitoring driver behaviours, and setting up driving simulators across all regions and countries where we operate within.

Progress on our strategic goals and targets

Goal/Target Progress
Achieve ISO 45001 compliance for all our divisions by 2025
Institute an occupational health and wellbeing program accessible to all employees by 2025
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