PROJECT OVERVIEW
Wald Family Foods is a family-owned food manufacturing company with facilities in McPherson, Kansas; Omaha, Nebraska; and Burlington, Iowa. From cheesy gluten-free pizzas to savory soups to flavorful Mexican entrees, Wald Family Foods creates delicious solutions for food distributors all over the country. As the company grew both their capabilities and locations, so did their goal to become known as a great place to work. Wald Family Foods wanted to get the message out to the workforce that they cared about their employees, and that care started with safety. To establish this reputation, they desired to create an internal safety program that offered valuable information and educational resources for all employees.
THE CHALLENGE
Wald Family Foods’ three food manufacturing facilities had room to grow in five core areas: safety, waste reduction, productivity, employee retention, and profitability. While it was ultimately up to the employees in each facility to improve their numbers in each category, it was also critical that those employees had easy access to mandatory and relevant training materials as well as safety information from reputable resources, such as OSHA. Furthermore, it was necessary to develop some type of incentive to encourage the Wald Family Foods teams to practice safety in the workplace.
Branding
Campaign Concept
Web Development
Design
CAMPAIGN CONCEPTS
Everyone likes a little bit of friendly competition. We worked with Wald Family Foods to create, plan, and launch the Plant of the Year competition, an annual company-wide contest to determine which of the Wald Family Foods’ plants made the biggest improvements in the previous year. The competition focused on the five main categories that Wald Family Foods strived to improve in: safety, waste reduction, productivity, employee retention, and profitability. We gave Plant of the Year its own logo, shared competition updates to the Wald Family Foods social media, and provided them with the Wald Cup – a blue traveling trophy to be awarded to that year’s winning plant.
To keep Waldsafe recognizable as a part of the Wald Family Foods organization, Agency 877 utilized many features of the food manufacturer’s branding, including their identifiable ‘W’ icon. The ‘W’ was incorporated into the Waldsafe logo as a checkmark. At Wald Family Foods, they check all the boxes when it comes to safety: safe people, safe facilities, and safe food.
BRANDING
After multiple conversations with key Wald Family Foods stakeholders and employee personnel, Agency 877 presented the concept of Waldsafe. Waldsafe is not just the name of Wald Family Foods’ internal safety program; it is also a way of working, a way of thinking. It takes three things for a team to be Waldsafe: safe people, safe facilities, and safe food. These three items formed the slogan of the safety program to serve as a reminder to all Wald Family Foods team members of what it takes to be Waldsafe.
To keep Waldsafe recognizable as a part of the Wald Family Foods organization, Agency 877 utilized many features of the food manufacturer’s branding, including their identifiable ‘W’ icon. The ‘W’ was incorporated into the Waldsafe logo as a checkmark. At Wald Family Foods, they check all the boxes when it comes to safety: safe people, safe facilities, and safe food.
WEB DEVELOPMENT
The primary goal of the Waldsafe website is to offer Wald Family Foods employees quick and easy access to a variety of free safety resources. It is critical that the site can be easily navigable for both desktop and mobile users, and can be translated at ease for Wald Family Foods’ large Spanish-speaking workforce.
Another key part of the Waldsafe website is the blog, or as it is known to Wald Family Foods employees, the monthly safety topic. Each month, we work closely with the company’s Director of Safety to create an informative article that discusses safety topics relevant to the current month and ensure that it links back to credible sources for employees to learn more.
MESSAGING
While it is important to Wald Family Foods that their employees stay safe and unharmed each day at work, it is also important to the employees’ families. We developed the concept of “For Family’s Sake” and created a messaging structure that placed emphasis on the loved ones waiting for the employees at home.
TESTIMONIAL
“I came to Agency 877 with an idea of what we wanted to implement, and they were able to take that vision to the next level. They produced even more than I had envisioned, but were also able to take my ideas and come up with new concepts that I hadn’t even considered.
Initially, our goal was to reduce accidents by at least 30% in the first year. Agency 877’s implementation of Waldsafe and the corresponding tools helped us to ultimately reduce accidents by 80% in 2023, blowing our original goal out of the water. Retention in each of our facilities also improved; I believe that the employee engagement that resulted from the new safety program played a significant part in that.
We couldn’t be more pleased with the results we have already seen in the first year of the Waldsafe program, and we look forward to continuing this partnership with Agency 877 to further improve employee safety.”
Jason Barker, Director of Safety and Loss Prevention at Wald Family Foods
