Sustainability is a main principle and strategic priority in our Vision & Strategy. It is part of our business and culture and ingrained in everything we do. To demonstrate accuracy in our goals, performance and transparency, we are engaging with and have been recognized and validated by leading global sustainability organizations.
“Receiving the third-party validations is crucial for building trust,” said Mukesh Jha, Chief Sustainability Officer. “Validation demonstrates our claims are accurate and our data has been independently verified.”
Currently, we are collaborating with several independent global organizations, including EcoVadis, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and CDP (formerly known as Carbon Disclosure Project). Our work with these sustainability organizations outlines our objectives of validating our goals and our proposed blueprint to reach them, as well as disclosing our current progress.
EcoVadis is a leader in sustainability assessment and monitoring. For our commitment and performance in 2024, we received a Gold rating from EcoVadis, placing us in the 96th percentile among companies rated by the organization. Furthermore, within the Manufacture of Other Food Products industry, we placed within the top 2% of companies. These ratings reflect our strong performance across EcoVadis’ key sustainability criteria, including environmental, labor, ethics and procurement practices.
The Gold rating we achieved in 2024 showcases the substantial improvement we have made in recent years, as we began in 2016 with an EcoVadis score of 34%. The strides we have made toward sustainability validation are essential in building transparency, corporate reputation and consumer trust.
“These evaluations are about showing the public our transparency,” said Daryl Sabourin, Senior Director, Sustainability. “They answer the question to ‘are we being comprehensive in our programming?’ There are so many things going on in the sustainability world, and we are going to have at least 95% of them covered within our collective strategy, whether action be through procurement, operations, marketing or Security/IT, for example.”
Because reducing carbon in our own operations as well as the emissions associated with our value chain is one of our priorities, we are also collaborating with the SBTi on our near-term and net-zero greenhouse gas reduction goals. After a rigorous 30-month process to validate our targets for 2030 and 2050, the SBTi published its approval of both goals in December, with the addition of our Forest Land and Agriculture (FLAG) objectives validated independently.
“These high scores and verifications demonstrate the strength and effectiveness of our programs and policies,” said Astrid Rademeyer, Senior Manager, Sustainability. “We hold ourselves to incredibly high standards in everything we do, whether it’s environmental, social or human rights-related.”
In February, we anticipate receiving a new score from CDP that evaluates our progress in reducing our impact on climate change, forestry and water, as well as our transparency in sharing this information with the public. The CDP score will help us measure our performance and further improve our best practices.