CEO and President: Responsible growth – a foundation for future success Climate change, a growing demand for food, natural resources under pressure – the challenges that our planet is facing are many. To be able to manage them, it is critical that we utilize our resources optimally and see responsible behavior as both our shared and individual responsibility. In this Sustainability Report, AAK’s sixth, we aim to present our corporate social responsibility objectives, activities and achievements in a transparent way. AAK’s core purpose is to create value-adding vegetable oil solutions together with and for our customers. In order to succeed with this purpose we use our company program AAKtion to guide us. The execution of AAKtion is built upon our model for responsible growth. Responsible growth for us, is about acting responsibly towards all of our key stakeholders – investors, global and local customers, suppliers, employees and the local communities in which we operate. To drive progress within our CSR activities, we focus our efforts within five areas: Marketplace, Supply chain, Environment, Workplace and Community. We continuously set and achieve ambitious objectives within each of these areas based on both internal and external performance benchmarking, best practice sharing and a highly engaged global organization. AAK – a trusted supplier Analyses of our business clearly indicate that food safety is a top concern for our customers and their stakeholders. This very much conforms to our own assessments. AAK production sites are food safety audited and certified in accordance with one or more internationally recognized food safety standards. Our recent acquisitions are currently undergoing this process. Another key priority for our customers as well as for ourselves is ethical supply. We share our ethical information and ethical audit reports through the Sedex platform. Responsible sourcing There is a strong request from our customers that the sourcing of raw materials is done in a responsible way, specifically within palm. We continue to increase our focus on social and environmental issues in the supply chain. Our fully implemented Supplier Code of Conduct addresses labour and human rights, environment and anti-corruption. Today, virtually all of our raw material suppliers have approved and signed our code. 2 In West Africa, we persistently work towards a more sustainable and efficient supply chain, benefitting both AAK and the hundreds of thousands of women who collect shea kernels. Our special Kolo Nafaso program, which focuses on support, training and trading directly with the women, continues to progress. During the season 2014/2015 we have been reaching out to 55,000 women, exceeding our goal of enrolling 50,000, and we will continue to progress and enroll more women in the upcoming years. We continue to support and be fully engaged in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and we also continue our engagement in GreenPalm, still today probably the only tool to ensure support also to independent smallholders producing certified sustainable palm oil. However, the RSPO requirements have been widely criticized for not effectively addressing CO2 emissions caused by deforestation and plantation development on peatlands. AAK shares this view and has a sustainable palm oil policy that outlines our commitments on sustainable palm in general and specifically requirements for no deforestation and no development on peatlands. We are pleased with the strong progress on the implementation of the policy and especially on traceability to mills. Resource efficiency We are also proud to share with you some good results within resource efficiency. Despite shifting our focus to more refined products that, in general, will require more resources per produced unit, we have made some great improvements for a number of key efficiency parameters. Energy consumption, calculated per MT produced, decreased by 2.8 percent while water consumption remained the same as last year. In 2014, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel per MT processed decreased by 11 percent compared to the year before. These achievements were delivered by a very dedicated and highly responsible global operations organization.
AAK - Sustainability Report 2014/2015
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