Supply Chain manages the production, packaging, and fulfillment of ConAgra Foods' consumer and commercial products worldwide. Key functions within Supply Chain include procurement, enterprise manufacturing, engineering, safety, health and environment, transportation, warehousing, sales and operations planning, and customer service.

Recently, Supply Chain introduced the ConAgra Performance System, which is designed to drive losses out of the company's manufacturing and supply chain operations and create a culture of continuous improvement.

Research, Quality & Innovation (RQI) works to create tomorrow's products today. While strategically aligning resources and businesses to renovate and grow the base business—to attack costs and enhance quality—RQI also is filling the innovation pipeline in order to generate sustainable, profitable growth. Key RQI functions include research and development, sensory, packaging, processing, quality assurance, food safety, scientific affairs, and culinary.

Recruiting, developing, and retaining the best people in these fields will help make RQI a best-in-class technical organization and foster a culture of quality.

Human Resources plays a critical role in nourishing people to build an inclusive and winning culture, beginning with efforts to identify and recruit a talented and diverse work force. Developing and retaining the right people in the right jobs and nourishing their passion depends on putting the right learning, reward, and recognition programs in place to drive behaviors that will produce results.

Over the past two years, Human Resources has worked across the business to institutionalize a Performance Management Process that aligns individual performance objectives with the company's business goals and core operating principles.

Finance is a strategic function at ConAgra Foods, partnering with business units across the enterprise to drive results. Financial professionals are integrated into every aspect of the business to facilitate strategic planning and ensure continuity. As they learn the business, financial professionals have opportunities to gain experience not only in traditional financial areas, but also in such areas as marketing, sales, and supply chain.

The range of experience afforded through a benchmark Financial Development Program, which includes rotational assignments in key Finance functions, and an Online Skills University are designed to help people drive results, show creativity, display initiative, and develop into leaders who can impact the top and bottom lines.

The Marketing team offers a unique combination of general management experience and brand marketing excellence that differentiates ConAgra Foods from its competitors and integrates marketers into every aspect of the business. Marketers learn the business and gain valuable general management experience—in such areas as marketing, finance, manufacturing, supply chain, and sales—that can help them develop into successful business leaders who drive top- and bottom-line results. They also develop expertise in specialty areas, such as consumer insights, package design, and integrated and shopper marketing.

Gaining a 360-degree perspective—understanding every relevant aspect of the consumer experience—is vital to their role as brand stewards. The company's marketers lead with insights, define the brand essence (its heart and soul), develop marketing plans across consumer touchpoints, and contribute to the innovation pipeline that nourishes the lives of consumers.

ConAgra Foods' Sales team takes a fact-based approach to selling with a passion for analytics. Understanding customers' business needs adds value, drives traffic, and helps the company gain a competitive advantage. Using interactive, state-of-the-art presentations that put up-to-the-minute sales trends, category diagnostics, and marketing campaigns at the Sales team's fingertips, ConAgra Foods goes to market in a variety of channels with one of the broadest product portfolios in the business—30 of its brands generate $100 million or more in annual sales.

The 100% in One Year program mixes classroom training with on-the-job experience to help new salespeople understand how such areas as marketing, supply chain, packaging, product development, and customer service work together to ensure customer and consumer satisfaction.

Information Technology (IT) consists of an Information Systems & Services group that applies technological solutions to solve business problems and a Business Transformation team focused on a strategic SAP implementation. The new SAP system is designed to simplify and streamline critical business processes in order to give the company an accurate, real-time look at key performance metrics and a true feel for the big picture.

Within IT, a formal career development program provides a framework for employees looking to enhance their skill sets and ensure meaningful career progression and development.

Legal and External Affairs represents ConAgra Foods to audiences outside and inside the company, helping them understand what the company does and what it stands for, while promoting and protecting the best interests of the business. Through its relations with governmental units, trade associations, and the media, the company's corporate affairs team helps shape ConAgra Foods' reputation and position its businesses for success. Working side by side with the business, the legal team leverages its speed and efficiency to find creative ways to help the business take smart and informed risks.

Meanwhile, the corporate communication team is working to drive better business performance through effective internal communication. A recent survey conducted by management consultant Watson Wyatt showed that ConAgra Foods scored better than high-performing benchmark companies in 11 categories of communication effectiveness.

ConAgra Foods is deeply committed to improving the quality of life in the communities in which it operates. Its overarching community involvement platform—Nourish Today, Flourish Tomorrow—focuses philanthropic efforts toward ending child hunger and enabling nutrition education programs. But there's more.

Whether the ConAgra Foods Foundation is funding Kids Cafes to feed hungry children, providing disaster relief, or awarding millions of dollars in grants to deserving nonprofit community organizations over the past 15 years, its efforts reflect the value the company places on collaborating with communities to help people succeed. This goes beyond its role as a taxpayer, employer, and purchaser of goods and services to encouraging employee voluntarism, addressing the issue of child hunger, and providing educational resources individuals can use to adapt and sustain a healthful, nutritionally balanced lifestyle.

ConAgra Foods takes a holistic approach to the employee-employer equation, viewing total rewards as a flexible combination of pay, benefits, learning and development, and work environment. The company believes in focusing on those rewards that have the greatest potential to increase employee engagement and align behavior with ConAgra Foods' vision, "Must Do's" and strategic business objectives.

In fiscal 2008, the company introduced a revitalized program of total rewards designed not only to bring it more in line with its competitors, but also to differentiate it positively from those same competitors in ways that will help ConAgra Foods recruit, develop, and retain the best talent in the workplace.

ConAgra Foods is reinventing itself. The new ConAgra Foods is one integrated company, growing its business and capabilities by nourishing lives. To feed more people, to feed the business, and to feed the future, all employees are working to simplify, collaborate, and be accountable for every aspect of what they do.

Employees have a clear vision of the new ConAgra Foods, and they're executing it right now. To make real progress, the company has established six "Must Do's"—rewire the organization, attack costs and enhance margins, optimize the portfolio, innovate, exceed customer and consumer expectations, and nourish our people—to build an inclusive and winning culture.

Learning and Development provides a framework for the future of ConAgra Foods. While pay and benefits are key to attracting employees, it is learning and development that is essential to retaining them. Through an organization development structure that includes a Performance Management Process, Individual Development Plans, a Learning Management System, and a comprehensive Competency Model—along with a variety of training and leadership development programs—the company not only nourishes people but aligns behaviors with business objectives.

Learning and Development also promotes career growth with talent management and succession planning efforts designed to ensure opportunities for future leaders to come from within the company.