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Policies and actions

Supporting global communities

Over the past two years, our focus has been on establishing core standards for all our suppliers.

Ethical trading policy and SEDEX (Supplier Ethical Data Exchange)

Our Ethical Trading Policy (ETP) sets out our expectations on environmental, health and safety and human rights standards in both our own and our suppliers’ operations.

As a first step towards understanding our supply chain, we enrolled the help of SEDEX. This is a recognised web-based tool for suppliers and customers to exchange data on the ethical standards they apply in their supply chain. It helps us to understand whether or not there are issues in our supply chain that might need attention. From here, we can develop priorities and plans to address them.

Last year we set stretching targets on commitments by our ingredients and packaging suppliers to both our own policy and SEDEX registration.

• 95% of our packaging and ingredients suppliers have formally accepted our ETP or registered with SEDEX. We will continually work towards full compliance of our ETP and will be conducting ‘spot check’ audits to ensure these stated standards are being fully carried out in practice.
• We have also strengthened our own policy. From now on, it forms an integral part of our contractual Terms and Conditions. For those that tell us they have their own equivalent policies, we have a process in place to independently assess whether these policies match or exceed our own standards.
• In 2007 we also committed to signing up all our remaining suppliers to our ETP within five years and reporting via SEDEX where appropriate. These suppliers include logistics, equipment, machinery, utilities, and services such as advertising, temporary labour and consultancy. This part of the supply chain is more complex and we will prioritise our efforts using a risk-based methodology. We have made some good progress. 30% of our indirect supplier spend last year was from sources signed up to our ETP.
• We are working with the AIM-PROGRESS group of global FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) companies to pool our efforts to promote transparency of standards throughout the global supply chain. AIM-PROGRESS is a global initiative that allows an exchange of views regarding responsible sourcing practices and aims to develop and promote industry collaboration through the use of common evaluation methods to assess performance within the supply chain.

Identifying priority areas in our fruit supply chain

With core standards in place, we are now examining our fruit supply chain in more detail. Our fruit processors’ responses to date indicate compliance with our policy, and a number of our suppliers have already undergone third party ethical audits.

However, we want to go further. We have developed our compliance process to include audits to the SEDEX standard and we will shortly be commissioning further third party audits in Asia and South America to ensure compliance of key suppliers in these locations. In particular we are keen to understand our supply chain beyond the processing plant level – that is, at farm level. Future plans will take this into account.

In the past year we started talking to organisations such as the Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade Foundation to understand if or how their certification standards may be applied in our supply chain. While early days, we remain open to such certification standards, though more work needs to be done.

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