Statement on Georgia-Pacific's Response to COVID-19
March 18, 2020
ATLANTA (News release) -- Georgia-Pacific values the health and safety of our employees, customers and consumers. In light of the ongoing outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus, we are taking the steps necessary to ensure that we are doing our part to prevent the spread of this virus in our workplaces and to help our customers maintain their businesses in a normal manner.
Most all of Georgia-Pacific's products are made in North America, primarily in the United States, so at this point, our facilities and offices are operating normally with no impacts from employees being infected.
Bath Tissue/Paper Towels Demand In our consumer products business, given the current situation, and just cold and flu season in general, we anticipate more handwashing - especially given how everyone is focused on and talking about good hand hygiene and preventing the spread of germs.
We do expect some "away from home" activity to decline as business travel and vacation plans change, along with companies encouraging employees to work from home when it makes sense. For our retail business, we have seen a significant increase in orders beginning last week. These increases have been as high as two times our normal demand.
Our manufacturing operations which produce toilet paper (for both consumer and B2B) are currently operating normally and we are doing our best to meet consumer demand. We're doing this through our use of existing inventory, increasing our production, and using a managed distribution process to smartly manage through this unusual period.
Inventory levels across our system remain healthy and we are working hard to maximize the number of deliveries we can load and ship out of our facilities - you can just load and unload so fast. Last week our mills and regional distribution centers managed to ship out ~120% of normal capacity. We also are working with customers to have direct shipments when possible to reduce distribution time. We currently don't have any issues with carrier capacity (trucks and trailers) to ship.
Limiting Access to our Facilities Our manufacturing locations are implementing updated procedures to manage requests from outside visitors and vendors to do all that they can to prevent the virus at those locations.
Our corporate and local pandemic response teams have been working to update and implement their plans and strategies for business continuity. We are continuing to monitor new developments in this pandemic and will continue to evolve our strategies to respond. Updates will be posted as they become available.
If you would like to get in touch or if you have any questions, please feel free to send us a private message on our primary social channels on Facebook or Twitter.
We appreciate our valued relationships with our employees, customers, communities and consumers.
