Celebrating World Safety Day

This World Safety Day, we want to highlight our continued efforts to keep our people safe and reflect on our ongoing work contributing to important issues such as smart drinking and road safety in the communities where we live and work. We have a critical role to play in driving forward a safe and responsible recovery.

While we see signs of some countries emerging from the pandemic, we remain in different phases of recovery across the world. I want to share some thoughts as we prepare for a safer and stronger return in the months ahead.

Our colleagues are, and will always be, our greatest strength.

The safety and well-being of our colleagues remain our top priority. We have worked vigorously to achieve high standards of health and safety in our facilities throughout the pandemic. We have implemented measures to provide our colleagues with the support and resources that they need to stay safe and healthy, in full compliance with - and even beyond - guidance from the WHO and local authorities. This includes strict health and safety practices, workplace capacity and social distancing guidelines, health tracking and personal protective equipment. We are proud of our colleagues around the world rising to the challenge each day, demonstrating ingenuity, passion and resilience.

Our commitment to smart drinking is unwavering.

Our teams are working together to drive the largest voluntary, social norms research-backed labeling initiative of any beer, wine or spirits company globally. These guidance labels seek to promote responsible consumption by including messages on actionable advice, such as to hydrate between drinks and eat while drinking.

To further promote smart drinking, our South African Breweries team recently launched a high-impact campaign for Easter weekend that promoted smart drinking, encouraged people to mask up, sanitize often and be responsible together during the holiday weekend.

We continue to bring people together for safer roads.

Our colleagues in South Korea at Oriental Brewery Company received an award from the Korea Road Traffic Authority for bringing positive contributions to local communities through its Road Safety program.

As many small to-midsize fleets lack the time and resources to develop safety programs, our Together for Safer Roads (TSR) road safety coalition worked to help them upgrade their road safety standards and procedures.

Through our renewed partnership with the United Nations Institute of Training and Research (UNITAR), we delivered two important deliverables in 2020 – translating the Safer Roads Toolkit into four languages to train over 3,000 people in more than 90 countries around the world and launching the Road Safety Toolkit app. The app’s methodology has been continuously tested and improved through several local projects in countries such as Brazil, China, the Dominican Republic, India, Mexico and South Africa. We truly believe its adoption in additional towns, cities and countries will continue to lead to positive results and save more lives.

We believe that we go further together than alone.

Partnerships make it possible to build a better world – and a safer world. We will continue our road safety work with the support and expertise of our valued partners, including TSR, UNITAR and road traffic authorities and city planners around the world.

Together, we can drive a strong recovery for our colleagues, consumers, customers and communities.