On the last weekend in February, Harmening called Don Mulligan, the company’s retiring chief financial officer who had already handed off his job. “I don’t think we understood how contagious this would be and how quickly it could spread,” Church said. They had little thought Americans might soon be doing the same thing. But while the rest of the country stayed shut down after the break because of the virus, General Mills workers were called back because the Chinese government deemed the company’s operations essential.īy February, headquarters executives watched as their Chinese counterparts started working from home. Workers in its four plants took their normal, two-week New Year break. The effects of the coronavirus first took hold in January on the company’s operations in China. Over the past two months, he added, “I have seen us move faster than we ever have before.” “Moving fast and being agile is probably not one of our strengths normally,” Harmening said. General Mills, while financially efficient, tends like most large companies to innovate at a slower pace and take more time to make a big change. General Mills shares are up 11% since the start of the year while the broader market is down about 12%.Īnd it’s one that even the company’s leaders acknowledge is a bit surprising. firms after the pandemic remade everyday life. It’s a performance that stands out not just among big food companies but all large U.S. have contracted COVID-19 as confirmed by testing. To date, just 20 of its more than 15,000 plant and office workers in the U.S. In March, the company told headquarters employees they were welcome to temporarily work in the plants to help out.Īnd like all companies, General Mills is also trying to stay ahead of the virus. Cereals like Cheerios and Lucky Charms are selling at multiples of their normal levels.īy case volume, production is running 10 to 20% higher at each of its 26 domestic plants. The company’s Progresso soups, Gold Medal flours and Betty Crocker and Pillsbury baking mixes at times have sold out in stores. In North America, where it makes most of its $17 billion in annual sales, General Mills’ factories have been running flat out for two months. “Now is a time when people are depending on us more than ever,” Jeff Harmening, the company’s chief executive, said last week. But for Golden Valley-based General Mills, it has led to skyrocketing demand for its products and an extreme test for 40,000 workers around the world. economy into a swift, steep downturn, damaging thousands of businesses and pushing 30 million people out of their jobs. In less than two months, the COVID-19 pandemic has driven the U.S. The plant never stopped churning out granola bars. “Within 24 hours, we were able to get a new supplier qualified and new product in,” said John Church, the top supply chain and logistics executive at the company. They asked several other suppliers to send cranberry samples to the company’s test kitchens by overnight shipping. The company’s logistics experts and food scientists quickly searched for substitutes, eager to meet surging demand for the snack bars from Americans stuck at home by the need to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In late March, General Mills learned that a supplier wouldn’t be able to deliver cranberries to its Albuquerque, N.M., plant, threatening to disrupt production of Nature Valley granola bars for a week.
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