Media
At the helm in Hannibal: charting a safer, more efficient future
Deanna Pinkham joined BASF in 2020 and has been leading the Hannibal, Missouri site since then, ensuring operations are conducted safely and products achieve the highest quality to meet customer needs.
Born and raised in a farming community in central Pennsylvania, Deanna Pinkham learned about the value of hard work, resilience and collaboration from a very young age.
She discovered her passion for chemistry in high school, thanks to a teacher who used hands-on experiments to explain real-life situations. Later, when she went to college, she realized that chemical engineering was the perfect field for her.
“Everything that people use in their everyday life is impacted by chemistry or chemical engineering, from the bottle you get your soda, to the food that you buy at the store,” Deanna reflects.
After a successful career across different industries, she joined BASF in 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, relocating from the Kansas City area to a smaller, more rural setting, and taking over operations of BASF’s site in Hannibal, Missouri. The pandemic added its own share of unique challenges, including stricter health protocols, social distancing and supply chain disruptions.
Today, having left the pandemic behind, Deanna firmly believes the team is stronger and more resilient, but challenges have changed and tackling them requires a different mindset.
Shaping new talent at Hannibal
Manufacturing sites across North America are experiencing a demographic shift, where experienced colleagues are approaching retirement, which means knowledge can potentially be lost and that talent needs to be backfilled. “That's the opportunity we have, talent development, getting folks here, getting them up the learning curve, engaging them and unlocking that potential, using new tools to do things in a more efficient way,” she explains.
As part of the talent development strategy, the leadership team at Hannibal has implemented several initiatives. One of the key programs which has helped infuse the site with new talent is the BASF North American Apprenticeship Development Program (NAADP). Hannibal became certified in the program a while back, and since then, many new chemical plant operators have joined site operations.
Having diverse teams is really important because we need people to think differently. We need to bounce ideas off each other and come up with a better solution.
Additionally, the site has partnered with the Missouri One Start program, which provides assistance to companies for training and upskilling new and existing team members, and in the past five years, over 70 people have participated in the program and gained hands-on experience. To capture more specific technical talent, such as engineers, the site has both an internship and a co-op program that act as an entryway into the chemical industry for young people who are still studying. These programs have been very successful for Hannibal, since according to Deanna, approximately 30% of the engineers currently employed at the site joined BASF through them.
In terms of professional growth, there are several different opportunities for team members to advance their career, including a high internal promotion rate. According to Deanna, a significant portion of supervisors began as operators, and over the last 5 years, close to 20% of the colleagues have been promoted to different roles across Hannibal, which not only improves engagement but also provides a map for employees to continue developing their career.
Additionally, every year Hannibal sends colleagues to participate in BASF’s Future Leaders Advancing Manufacturing Excellence (FLAME) program, aimed to support, develop and empower leaders in manufacturing.
A sustainability and cost reduction roadmap
Sustainability is a priority for BASF, and sites review their processes to uncover new and more effective ways to use resources, reduce waste and contribute to the company’s 2030 goal of lowering CO2 emissions from production processes by 25% from a 2018 baseline. As Deanna explains, “about a year and a half ago, we embarked on a project to try and understand what opportunities we had to reduce our CO2 emissions. Now, we have a very robust roadmap for the next three to five years that can guide the projects we will be working on.”
Another initiative at Hannibal known as Project Guardian, focuses on encouraging colleagues to get involved, identify operational efficiencies, help lower fixed costs at the site and propose solutions to keep the site competitive for the future. This project empowers team members to embrace the winning behaviors of the BASF strategy, think outside of the box, be proactive and contribute to meeting the site and company goals.
“We are not all doing the same things as before, so it’s important that we try and figure out how we can all contribute and don't just wait for somebody to ask you or for someone else to come up with the ideas,” Deanna shares. Today, the program has produced over 75 individual measures, all of which have the potential to achieve significant savings.
Safety as a value
As Deanna shares, “At Hannibal, we don’t treat safety as a priority that can shift when pressure rises—we treat it as a core value. Values remain constant, and because safety is non‑negotiable, it must guide every decision we make.”
She acknowledges that safety is a marathon and not a sprint, reinforcing the need to keep focus on the fundamentals. While challenges are an inherent part of manufacturing, Deanna sees them as an important opportunity to strengthen BASF’s safety culture—built on positive behaviors, personal accountability, and genuine care for one another. “We’re working to build a culture where we stop, pause, think, and then act—while supporting one another along the way,” she explains.
To support this journey, the site gathers input from both BASF employees and contractors to identify strengths and opportunities for improvement. Deanna is confident that these insights will help shape key actions throughout 2026 as the team works together to enhance how they think about and practice safety every day.
“We know we have important work ahead of us,” she adds, “but we also know we have the capability, the people, and the commitment to get better every day. Our focus is to keep learning, maintain accountability at every level, and ensure that safety remains at the heart of everything we do.”
The biggest job on Earth
Being site director in a rural area comes with its own set of challenges, but for Deanna, this role holds much more personal significance: it connects her with her childhood, growing up in a farming community and being a key partner to farmers across North America.
“Our customers feed the world, and if they didn't have our products, we'd have less food and potentially impact how people access food. We have a really great purpose, and that's what I'm trying to impart to my team: we come to work every day to make sure that people can have food on their tables down the line. It's bigger than just making chemicals,” she reflects.
Published on February 12, 2026 by Mariana Licio.
For media inquiries or to repurpose this article, please contact Lisa Brown.