ENVIRONMENTAL COMMITMENT

Whether it's jambalaya or pilaf, risotto or au gratin, billions of people all over the world enjoy eating rice. And the rice that is known world wide as the best you can buy comes from the Uncle Ben's^® Brand.

We began milling rice in Houston, Texas 50 years go. In that time we've become the number one brand of rice in the world. Our goal is to consistently deliver the high quality you expect from the Uncle Ben's^® Brand.

At the same time, we want to protect and preserve our environment, and we've developed some unique approaches to environmental concerns. Energy conservation is an underlying benefit for all environmental activities, and we seek to conserve energy in everything we do, from process design to finished goods warehousing.

We've been committed to energy conservation since our beginning, years before environmental issues became a worldwide concern.

The makers of Uncle Ben's^® goal is to avoid wasting a single pound of the raw material that enters our plants. "Rough rice," or rice in its hull, comes to us from select local farms and is first steeped or soaked in water and then steamed.

That way the rice grain absorbs vitamins and minerals from the hull and bran layer. Then the rice is dried, shelled to remove the hull, and the resulting brown rice is either packaged and sold or milled into white rice. If the rice is milled, the resulting rice bran is used in a variety of other products.

A grain of rough rice is about 20% rice hull. Supplying North America’s Uncle Ben's^® rice requirements means we have to dispose of over 200,000 pounds of rice hulls every single day. Instead of sending them to landfills, we burn the hulls to heat water and generate steam to cook our rice. The resulting hull ash is sold in the steel industry to be used for insulation.

With the thermal energy produced by the excess steam, we co-generate a portion of our own electricity in our Houston, Texas plant. Ultimately, we want to become energy self-sufficient. In burning rice hulls, we must be especially careful about emissions. In addition to following all of the regulations and guidelines of the Clean Air Act, Uncle Ben's Inc. has specifically trained associates who monitor this process as well as independent laboratories who visit our facilities for regular inspections of our emissions