While our businesses must be flexible to changing market dynamics, our commitment to building a values-focused culture through leadership development and continuous improvement is unwavering. We are a company that prides itself on attracting and developing leaders at all levels in the organization. It lies at the heart of building an agile culture where people are empowered to think and act to drive positive change. In 2007, we invested in over 7,500 person days of learning and development in Direct Personal Leadership, Leading Innovation, Manufacturing Excellence, Sales Excellence, Six Sigma, and Project Leadership. Our workplace safety record continued its seventh consecutive year of improvement in lost time accidents. Since establishing a comprehensive workplace health and safety scorecard in 2005, we have benchmarked our performance annually and in 2007 achieved a 33% improvement across all
Maple Leaf operations. We are also rigorously tracking employee engagement and responding to issues to create a better workplace. Our Six Sigma professionals are at the forefront of leading change projects to success employing their expertise in analysis, project and change management.