NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / December 11, 2023 / Mondelez International
We are committed to enhancing social sustainability and respecting human rights across the whole value chain.
Mondelez 2022 Snacking Made Right Report
We strive to make sure that the rights of people in our value chain are respected and promoted and that the communities where we matter most are resilient. To this end, we run pragmatic human rights due diligence across the value chain and focus on key areas where we believe we can make a greater impact, including tackling human rights risks in our sourcing of key commodities.
The Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit (SMETA) protocol is used to evaluate our internal manufacturing sites against a common set of corporate social responsibility standards, developed for the consumer goods industry.
OUR GOALS AND AMBITION
Our 2025 ambition is to implement robust, risk-based human rights due diligence across our value chain, and we have the following 2025 goals:
- 100% of our manufacturing sites completed a SMETA audit within the past 3 years
- 100% of our prioritized supplier sites completed a SMETA audit within the past 3 years
- 100% of Cocoa Life communities in West Africa are covered by a Child Labor Monitoring & Remediation System (CLMRS)
Strong Focus and Governance
We strive to ensure the rights of people along our value chain are respected and promoted. This includes our approximately 91,000 employees around the world, people working for our suppliers, and people growing our ingredients.
As set out in our Human Rights Policy, we follow the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as a framework to guide our approach to identify and address risks, and to disclose our progress. For more information, please see our annual Human Rights Due Diligence Report.
Our Human Rights Working Group defines our human rights due diligence strategy and drives its implementation throughout our organization. This working group reports regularly to functional and business leaders and annually to the Board's Governance, Membership and Sustainability Committee.
We collaborate with peers in the Consumer Goods Forum Human Rights Coalition (CGF HRC) to help make the approach mainstream, learn from each other, and show the way for the sector more broadly, including publishing a human rights due diligence (HRDD) roadmap.
In 2022, we also worked with a range of external advisors, including TwentyFifty, Embode, and our Cocoa Life External Advisory Board, to help us assess and strengthen our approach.
Moreover, we support legislative efforts to make human rights due diligence mandatory for all companies along the value chain.
"We strive to work with suppliers and partners with comparably high standards of conduct when it comes to responsible sourcing. We expect them to follow our Human Rights Policy, and to communicate these expectations throughout their supply chain. We take a riskbased approach and pragmatic steps to rollout human rights due diligence and inform our sourcing practices from our direct suppliers to our key upstream ingredient supply chains. We are committed to making our human rights due diligence system better every day and wherever possible strive to join forces with industry peers to accelerate progress."
Thomas Gaengler
Chief Procurement Officer
Mondelez International
Ongoing Due Diligence Efforts We undertake practical, proactive, ongoing human rights due diligence to identify, mitigate, and reduce the likelihood of potential and actual human rights impacts within our own operations, and work with our business partners across our supply chain to achieve the same. We identify potential human rights issues and monitor compliance with our policies. We use the Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit (SMETA) protocol to evaluate our internal manufacturing sites against a common set of corporate social responsibility standards developed for the consumer goods industry. We also require higher-risk direct suppliers to complete a SMETA audit.
Despite delays in previous years related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to make strong progress towards our 100% audit targets for our own manufacturing sites1 and prioritized supplier sites over a 3-year cycle. As of the end of 2022, approximately 62%of our own manufacturing sites1 and approximately 87%prioritized supplier sites have completed a SMETA audit within the past three years.2
Despite the continued effects related to the pandemic, we will continue our efforts to execute audits of our remaining global manufacturing sites and supply chain.
Beyond our audit program, we continued to enhance our human rights due diligence systems by building internal capabilities, embedding good practices within our business, and prioritizing key focus areas.
Conducting a New Value Chain Human Rights Assessment
In 2022, we conducted a new value chain human rights risk assessment. It confirmed key risks and areas we should prioritize. The first priority is to focus on helping to tackle human rights risks in key supply chains (cocoa, palm oil, and hazelnuts), including living wage and income, as well as forced, and child labor.
Supporting Living Wage
We continued to focus on living wage in own operations by starting to embed living wage benchmarking into our ongoing compensation process and extending our approach to better understand challenges with agency labor in our facilities.
Speaking Up and Investigating
Our Speaking Up and Investigations Policy empowers our colleagues to ask questions and raise concerns confidentially and anonymously through a telephone HelpLine and an online WebLine. We monitor contacts and work diligently to address concerns raised in a timely fashion.
Continuing to Build our Internal Capabilities on Human Rights
We offer a Human Rights training program in close to thirty languages and encourage our office-based colleagues worldwide to participate.
"Training our employees across the world is a significant step forward in bringing our Human Rights Policy to life. We aim to help our employees better understand their rights and equip them to look out for one another, so that we can each play our role to Do What's Right and respect and promote Human Rights."
Amy Corona
VP, Global People Lead, Mondelez Supply Chain
Mondelez International
Collaborating Across the Sector
To help achieve widespread change across whole supply chains, we collaborate with peer companies, expert organizations, and governments with an aim to work together to help tackle issues such as forced and child labor and to uphold human rights.
As a founding and board member of the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), for example, we work collaboratively with our peers, suppliers, and civil society organizations to help combat the risks of child and forced labor in the cocoa supply chain, and to drive efforts to strengthen public-private partnership with the governments of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.
As a board member of CGF, we work collaboratively to help tackle the risks of forced labor. We support CGF's Priority Industry Principles on Forced Labor. We also co-chair CGF's Forest Positive Coalition of Action and the Palm Oil Working Group, are a member of the Human Rights Coalition of Action, and a signatory to the UN Women's Empowerment Principles.
"Tackling the underlying drivers of human rights risks in global value chains takes a systemic collaborative approach. We collaborate with various peers and retailers under the Consumer Goods Forum Human Rights Coalition with an aim to make human rights due diligence mainstream and help put an end to forced labor and other salient issues common to the entire sector."
Virginie Mahin
Senior Director Global Social Sustainability & Stakeholder Engagement, and Co-chair of the CGF Human Rights Coalition
Taking Action on Palm Oil
Through our POAP, we require suppliers to respect the labor rights of all workers and embed the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) Priority Industry Principles on Forced Labor within both their own operations and supply chains. The POAP requires suppliers to provide annual assurance of continuous improvement, verified by third-party labor rights experts.
To support the mainstreaming of robust due diligence practices in the palm oil sector, we collaborated with peers in the CGF Human Rights Coalition, the Fair Labor Association, and the International Organization for Migration to deploy and test systems at each stage of the supply chain. We also complemented this support to palm oil suppliers with engagement of key actors of the Malaysian recruitment market, as well as joint advocacy towards the Malaysian government and the government of migrant workers' country of origin.
For more information on our sustainable palm oil sourcing, see pages 47.
Going Further with Cocoa Life
We made key advances to enhance social sustainability and respect human rights in 2022, through Cocoa Life - our signature cocoa sourcing program. These included launching a new Strategy to Help Protect Children, which sets out our approach to help enhance child protection systems and improve access to quality education in Cocoa Life communities. We also scaled CLMRS in nearly 74%1 of Cocoa Life communities in West Africa and continue our work to further enhance the quality of the system.
For more information on Cocoa Life see pages 31.
1 Reported information for the period from January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022 includes a community as covered by CLMRS if the work of identifying children, if any, in or at risk of child labor has been completed by the end of the year, even if any appropriate remediation and post-remediation follow-up occurs in the following year. CLMRS data is provided by third parties. Includes Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Nigeria.
2 Excludes closed manufacturing sites.
3 Prioritized supplier sites are defined as Tier-1 Direct material supplier sites, and excludes suppliers that are not registered on SEDEX, have not yet received a risk score or received a risk score other than High Risk, or have not yet made audit results available to Mondelez International.
Read more in the Mondelez 2022 Snacking Made Right Report
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Contact Info:
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SOURCE: Mondelez International
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