As the world’s population grows, so does demand for food, increasing the environmental impacts of agriculture. Rising prices of basic food crops and increasing competition for land and water between farmers and communities cause serious social and economic consequences.
Providing affordable food for everyone while protecting the planet’s resources is one of society’s greatest challenges. As sourcing our ingredients makes up the largest part of our environmental footprint, we have a responsibility to reduce our impacts. The ways in which we source also present opportunities to create mutual benefits for our business, suppliers and sourcing communities. We seek to buy from suppliers who respect their workers and local communities and who are reducing the environmental impacts of their operations so affordable, good-quality ingredients will be available in the future.
With thousands of raw materials in our supply chain, we have to prioritize. We focus on some materials based on the volume we use and others because their impacts are particularly high. Still, more raw materials fall into these categories, but for these the best path forward is not yet clear. Read Our Approach for more information.
We use techniques such as lifecycle analysis to identify where and how we can make the biggest difference. Lifecycle analysis assesses environmental impacts at each stage of a product's life, from raw material extraction and processing, to manufacture, distribution, use, maintenance and disposal.
Our approach is to increase the availability of our raw materials through innovative agricultural science that decreases environmental impacts while working to, where necessary, improve living standards in communities that produce these materials. We work with governments, industry, academic and nongovernmental organizations to amplify the positive impacts of these initiatives.
We also use our relationships with suppliers to encourage industrywide change and work with them to change their practices and improve the sustainability of the goods they produce. Standardized in 2011, our supplier code of conduct sets globally consistent criteria for all our sourcing partners.
