Kellogg's new UK corporate affairs director Paul Wheeler is considering a comms drive to encourage its 2,000 employees to get involved with its CSR efforts.

Paul Wheeler: Kellogg's new UK corporate affairs director
The key plank is the ‘breakfast clubs’ that the company has funded for the past decade, giving children the chance to eat before school with teachers and classmates.

Staff could also get involved with Kellogg’s more recent support for food banks, which may become a bigger operation this year.

Talking to PRWeek following his promotion from head of external comms at the end of February, Wheeler said he wants ‘to do more to tell our corporate story’.

‘We are looking at rolling out an employee volunteering programme that my team would manage,’ he said.

His predecessor, Rachel Fellows, was promoted in January to European director for external comms and brand PR, leading an expanded three-strong team based in the company’s European headquarters in Dublin.

This follows the US-listed cereal producer’s transformative acquisition of the Pringles snack brand from Procter & Gamble last year.

While Pringles are produced in Belgium, Wheeler is focusing on UK-based staff who produce Kellogg’s products at one Manchester factory and two Wrexham factories, as well as staff from its Manchester head office.

Kellogg’s UK recently recommitted to the breakfast club initiative, also known to the public as ‘Give A Child A Breakfast’, with the pledge to give away 15 million breakfasts by 2016.

Wheeler added he had no plans to change the six-year-old company culture of employing PR agencies only for occasional project work.

‘The philosophy is that PROs should be within the business next to people making the decisions. Rather than being the last step in the chain, we can be in right at the beginning of the first meeting. It may not work for other businesses but it works for us.’