By Bill Newlands, President & Chief Executive Officer

To achieve our long-term ambitions as a company, we must continue to find ways to win with an increasingly diverse consumer base. We have long believed that cultivating a workforce that reflects the consumers and communities we serve and creating a workplace culture where all talent can come together and thrive are key elements to reaching our full potential. 

Our focus on diversity and inclusion has played a major role in this process, and while we still have much work to do in this regard, I’m proud of the progress we’ve made to date on these two fronts. Our people and culture have been and will continue to be foundational to our success.

One additional hallmark of our success over the years has been our ability to recognize and adapt to shifts in consumer, employee, shareholder, and other stakeholder sentiment, as well as the surrounding environment. As we’re all fully aware, we are operating in an increasingly polarized and highly charged environment and a shifting legal landscape related to social and political issues. This requires us to be thoughtful in our approach and to operate with enhanced focus going forward.

My team, along with other teams across the company, have been engaged in discussions about this topic for the past several months and I want to provide an update on steps we are taking to evolve our approach in alignment with our company’s mission and values.

  • Going forward, the work led by our Diversity and Inclusion Team will focus intently on helping to build an inclusive culture at Constellation. To better reflect our intent, this team will now be referred to as our Inclusive Culture Team. This team will help drive our company’s focus on building an inclusive culture that fully executes our business strategy, meets the needs of an evolving consumer base, positively contributes to our communities, and creates sustainable competitive advantage.

  • Our Business Resource Groups will continue to play key roles in helping to build an inclusive culture rooted in mutual understanding, respect, and trust. This is key to developing a high-performing team that represents our values and leadership standards, and that is capable of winning with an evolving consumer base and achieving Constellation’s long-term goals. Our BRGs will continue to be open to all employees on a volunteer basis, focus intently on culture-building and engagement, help in providing professional development opportunities for talent across our business, and will lend their unique perspectives to help guide Constellation's stakeholder and marketing communications, where applicable.

  • We will retire our Focus on Female Founders and Focus on Minority Founders programs, while maintaining our focus on finding early-stage ideas inclusive of these start-ups that are distinct, aligned with our business strategy and consumer trends, and that have the potential to create long-term value for our company.

  • Going forward, our Supplier Diversity program will be known as our Supplier Inclusion program to more accurately reflect our intent, which is to engage with local small businesses where we operate that provide services aligned with our company’s needs. This aligns with our ongoing commitment to do our part to help build thriving and sustainable communities that support local residents, our employees, and our business.

  • To most effectively advance our inclusive culture goals, we will focus the efforts of our talent and direct our resources towards the priorities listed above, and pause activities that fall beyond these priorities, including our participation in external surveys that have proven to have much less of an impact in driving progress against our inclusive culture priorities.

This work will continue to play an important role in our efforts to help elevate human connections and communities, to build brands people love, and to build a company that in all respects is Worth Reaching For.