Food and beverage producers

Food and Beverage processors & sustainability

Consumer preferences are shifting towards more sustainable products, while pressure on change is building from NGOs and governments on societal issues like de-carbonisation, plastic waste and labour issues. Simultaneously, F&B processing employees increasingly value sustainability as a condition in their daily work. This puts sustainability high on the agenda for international producers of food & beverage ingredients and consumer products.

New targets include improvements on carbon, water and farm conditions in the supply chain towards 2025-2030. But how do you manage or influence sustainable sourcing in farms in Africa, Asia and Latin America? And how do you measure the progress of your interventions and partnerships?

We support Food & Beverage processors in achieving their sustainability goals with 5 proven steps

We give you refreshing insights into these questions and more in five proven steps. Whether you choose to use our expertise in all five steps or less, we will help you achieve your sustainability goals.

Develop and review strategy

1. Develop & review your sustainability strategy

Your efforts to preserve your products and supply chain will be more effective if you have a strategy that is customised to specific products, chains, sectors, regions and sustainability themes. We translate various challenges into a relevant, ambitious and feasible strategy, such as clarifying the working conditions of farmers in developing countries, reducing the amount of sugar and salt in products and reducing your carbon footprint. We provide a high-level roadmap and insight into the baseline of your current sustainability performance.

Products that help you define your strategy:

Improvement plan

2. Sustainability improvement plan

In this phase, we translate your strategy into an improvement plan and provide concrete intervention options, such as reducing methane emissions by training farmers. All recommended options are ex-ante tested on their expected effectiveness. The improvement plan includes cost-benefit analyses for every proposed measure. We also check feasibility and the expected degree of support required by your stakeholders.

Products that provide you with a concrete action plan:

Integrated monitoring system

3. Integrated sustainability monitoring

After finalising and executing the recommended interventions, we will measure the progress of the key performance indicators as well as your ultimate sustainability goal; for example, lower carbon emissions, water stress or packaging waste across your supply chain.

Our monitors are delivered regularly in the form of reports and presentations. We also provide dashboards and apps that show your real-time progress. You can easily share the output easily with your partners.

Products that keep you informed:

Implementation

4. Implementation

When implementing the interventions, we can provide you with crucial and fact-based explanations of the measured effects. We have experience explaining farm, value chain and consumer incentive structures and can help you develop training programmes and other capacity-building exercises that can have a positive impact on environmentally-friendly farming.

We can also facilitate dialogues in the value chain to address actionable improvements.

Products that indicate what is happening and why:

Impact evaluation

5. Sustainability impact evaluation

Finally, we can determine the extent to which you have achieved your sustainability goals and whether you can link specific outcomes (e.g. changed consumer behaviour) to the interventions. This will help you draw the right conclusions.

We can also shed light on the cost-effectiveness of the interventions. Based on our extensive experience in executing robust mid-term or year-end evaluations, we can apply up-to-date techniques for conducting an independent, rigorous evaluation. The insights provide evidence on whether you are closer to reaching your goal or whether you have to adjust your sustainability plan. Here, we strike the right balance between societal impact, investments and financial gains.

Products that tell you to what extent you achieved your goals:

More information on sustainability