May 8, 2021
Vital Farms Response
5yWe are always grateful for feedback. We also realize the important role we have as a business in promoting a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive world. This is an ongoing journey for us; one in which we consistently practice our core values of empathy, humility, ownership, and growth.
Because we take our work surrounding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) extremely seriously, we would like to address some of the specific claims related to hiring, compensation, and promotion inequity.
Our company has always been transparent and honest. This is how we communicate with our consumers, crewmembers (also known as our employees), and all of our stakeholders. During the hiring process we are very open about compensation and benchmark our range against the industry. We believe we offer competitive compensation packages and are always happy to be even more transparent about salary, benefits, bonus, and equity (which apply to all crewmembers) during the hiring process and as crewmembers build their career with us. Promotions have always been fairly evaluated with our leadership team as part of crewmember performance reviews.
With regard to any perceived inequities on either of these topics: last year we began a partnership with the National Diversity Council (NDC) for two projects: 1) help us assess and increase diversity across our crew and 2) conduct a review of our crewmember population, compensation, and promotion history to identify any inadvertent inequities in pay and promotion. On the latter project—because it’s related to the claims cited in this review—we want to note that NDC did not find any inequities in our crewmember compensation and or promotion history.
Our crewmembers are one of eight stakeholders to Vital Farms. The others include farmers and suppliers, consumers and customers, community and the environment, and stockholders. We want our crewmembers to reflect the diversity that exists across all our stakeholder groups. We are pleased to have a gender-balanced Board of Directors that is highly influential in how we govern the business.
As we work with NDC to increase diversity across our crew, to date we have completed a crew-wide survey, 11 focus groups organized by specific demographics, and one-on-one conversations with key leaders across the company. We are now applying what we have learned to a DEI-specific action plan that will guide how we hold ourselves accountable to increasing diversity across our crew.
Our commitment to DEI is ongoing. We know we have much more work to do as we navigate this topic. This includes continuously educating ourselves and learning from our crewmember’s past and present. As always, we promise to be transparent and honest with our stakeholders as we continue this very important journey.