ConAgra Foods, which is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, is one of North America’s leading food producers, with brands in 97 percent of America’s households. Examples include Banquet®, Chef Boyardee®, Egg Beaters®, Healthy Choice®, Hebrew National®, Hunt’s®, Marie Callender’s®, Orville Redenbacher’s®, PAM®, Peter Pan®, Reddi-wip®, and many others.
The company has a strong reputation not only in food safety, but also sustainability. ConAgra Foods was a founding member of AMERIPEN, which is an industry organization dedicated to analyzing the environmental and social effects of packaging, creating a better understanding of the role of packaging, and minimizing its environmental impacts. AMERIPEN’s members span the full range of packaging value chain operators, from producers and users, to retailers and recyclers.
In 2011, ConAgra Mills, one of ConAgra Foods’ commercial businesses, launched a new line of flours for the bakery industry called “SafeGuard.” While primarily focused on wheat, the technology is applicable to a number of grains. The main idea behind SafeGuard is to provide the industry with flour, even if eaten raw, that helps mitigate the risk of consumers getting sick. It’s a bigger problem than one might imagine. Flour often ends up being eaten raw before being cooked: fingerfulls of fresh dough for breads and cake mix before they enter the oven for baking are prime examples. Others include frozen pizzas, pies, cakes, brownies, soups, and other mixes, just to name a few.
