Podcast: Why Coca-Cola Consolidated is campaigning for safety

Key takeaways

• Tracking SIF events and fleet metrics keeps safety performance visible and actionable across the organization.
• The "first 100 days" campaign builds urgency and accountability, treating the start of the year like a full cycle.
• AI tools are enhancing safety, with applications expanding from vehicles to facility operations.
• Rotating and refreshing campaigns helps prevent safety fatigue while keeping awareness top of mind..

You may be good, but you can always be better. That’s the approach Coca-Cola Consolidated has taken toward workplace safety. The publicly traded bottling company started a new safety campaign in 2024, the First 100 Days of Safety. It was so successful that Coca-Cola Consolidated expanded to three safety campaigns in 2025 and has no signs of slowing down. Dennis Padgett, senior director of risk control at Coca-Cola Consolidated, discusses what’s worked and what’s next with EHS Today’s Managing Editor Nicole Stempak. Padgett will be speaking at Safety Leadership Conference 2025, being held from October 20-22 in Pheonix, Arizona. 

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

NS: You've been at Coca-Cola Consolidated for 25 years, which in itself is an accomplishment. What would you say are some of the things you're most proud of, or your biggest accomplishments during your time there?

DP: Yeah, I'm very proud of that. I've been here 25 years, and I've seen a lot of change—how we go to market with our products, how we tackle safety and losses. So a lot’s gone on. But I think probably my number one thing that I’m most proud of is, since I started in the year 2000, we have steadily dropped our accident frequency rate. It was double digits when I started—really based in the sales operation side of our business, outside the four walls. But as of today, our 12-month moving average is 3.8. So we’ve had a long journey, and it’s not even possible to get here without the collaboration of our operations team and our leaders. Everybody’s bought into safety, and we’ve done a really good job. I’m very proud of that. And I’ve really led that charge since 2014. I’ve got a fantastic team around me.

The second thing I’d say I’m most proud of is just the people I work with, the people I’m able to lead and serve. I’ve met some outstanding individuals in my time at Coca-Cola Consolidated—from leadership all the way through the business. Watching folks persevere over obstacles, being able to come alongside them, and celebrating our successes together—I’d count that as probably my greatest accomplishment: the interaction with the people I’ve had the privilege to work with and around.

NS: What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced during your time there, and maybe some of the things you’re working on or trying to address now?

DP: The challenges are always out there, and so are the opportunities. We’re never going to be as good as we want to be, and that’s the attitude we try to take.

I think some of our biggest challenges, from my perspective and what I do, involve managing fleet safety. Fleet safety is our biggest risk on a day-to-day basis, simply because we’re out in the general public in an uncontrolled environment. So not only do we have to teach, coach, and train our drivers, but we don’t know what people are going to do on the road or at customer locations.

The other big challenge we have in our company is ergonomics. Moving the product outside the four walls is a tough job. So we really focus on ergonomics as a company, trying to get better at moving product around.

NS: Let’s talk about safety campaigns, which will be the topic of your keynote presentation at Safety Leadership Conference. Has Coca-Cola tried them before? Maybe, how were they received?

DP: So, have we tried safety campaigns before? We have—dabbled is probably the best word. Kind of latched on to bigger events happening, like a safety day or World Safety Day, those kinds of things. We’ve done that in the past.

But I’ll tell you, Nicole, here’s one of my challenges being in the safety field, right? I work for arguably one of the best marketing and sales organizations in the world, and they constantly outdo themselves. And so here I am with the safety function—how do I message that alongside the great work our marketing and sales folks do?

So really, this all came about by thinking in those terms: how do I get our message out? We’re doing really good. So, number one, I want to celebrate and let everybody know how well we’re doing, but also, how do we get better? That really became the beginning of doing safety campaigns in our company.

NS: Your presentation is about the three campaigns the company is running in 2025. Can you share a little bit more about them? Tell us what each of them are, how they originated, and maybe what problems you’re trying to address or how you’ve gone about rolling them out?

DP: Nicole, that’s a great question. So I approached this with three questions in mind: Do I know my opportunities? Do I know my organization? And do I know what resources are available for me? That’s kind of where we started. And this process is all about focusing on the issues we already know we have—the opportunities. I already talked about two of those, which are ergonomics and fleet safety, from both a severity and frequency standpoint. Those are two hazards we face all the time. So we really focused on those.

Engagement, I think, is the third thing we focused on. I have teammates out in the field doing safety services for the company, and engagement is a priority with the frontline and with our frontline supervisors. I would call that where the rubber meets the road. So we focused on that engagement piece, and we do that in a number of ways, but we also have a lot of metrics that measure it.

So, the First 100 Days is all about getting off to a good start. If you don’t get off to a good start, then you’re playing from behind the rest of the year. It really puts a lot of pressure on everybody, and we want to always be in a good spot with that.

The things we measure in this First 100 Days are SIF events—we don’t want to have any serious injuries or fatalities. We also measure claims. We’re kind of a claims-driven organization, and safety’s part of that—the pre-loss piece of it. So we measure what we call “best in class.” From a claim rate percentage, we have a goal to be at this number or less, and we continue to push that down.

We look at it that way. We look at ergonomic injuries. And Nicole, one of the things that we like to joke about is we tend to hit stationary objects in parking lots—we made a sport out of it. But we’re doing a lot better. So we focus on that, and then there’s engagement—safety observations, meeting with leaders—those kinds of things drive that First 100 Days, which is the most important campaign to get us off to a good start.

NS: What's your timeline for that? And what are you seeing so far? How's that going?

DP: Over the last two years, we've managed to avoid, year over year, about 20 accidents, and so it's going well. We really carve out that first 100 days. It runs from January 1st to April 10th, I believe, which is the first 100 days we’re measuring and putting out scorecards every couple of weeks.

In the Coca-Cola Consolidated world, leaders and market unit leaders are very competitive, and each market unit wants to do better than the other in a healthy, friendly competition. We've been able to hone in on that and use it to help drive the safety message. They’ve done a fantastic job getting in front of teammates and leaders, taking hold of what we're doing. So we've run that campaign that way. This is our second year of the first 100 days. The first year was a little clunky, but we got better this year—a lot more engagement than in the prior year. And again, we've had some good results already from that.