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4. Values-Led Sourcing Values-Led Sourcing Everyone knows it takes the finest ingredients to make great ice cream. But to make truly euphoric Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, we’re also looking for suppliers of those ingredients who are working to make the world a better place. We call this project “Values-Led Sourcing” and we’ve been working at it for most of our Company’s history. We believe that incorporating our Company values into our purchasing decisions is one of the best ways we can advance all three parts of our Company Mission together. Some of the Values-Led Sourcing initiatives we’ve included in our purchasing decisions include suppliers with…
Click on each ingredient in the table below to learn more about our VLS projects.
Values-Led Suppliers Chart
Going the extra mile for Values-Led Sourcing is not always an option. At times, we’re unable to find the quality we need, supplies aren’t up to our specifications, or costs exceed what we can sustainably afford. In 2007, 39 percent of the raw material spend (i.e., ingredients, dairy, packaging) for our Vermont production went to initiatives that we see as aligned with our values, compared to 49 percent in 2006. Figures for production at other plants were not available at the time of this report’s publication. The significant drop is due to the fact that the paperboard we purchase for our pint packaging was not sourced through a VLS supplier in 2007 as we were delayed in our transition from the unbleached EcoPint, which was discontinued in 2006, to a pint made with Forest Stewardship Council Certified (FSC) paperboard. The FSC paperboard will be a VLS project, so we anticipate that our VLS spend percentage will rebound once we complete this packaging transition. Our VLS spend percentage can be somewhat variable from year to year, rising and falling with the volatile price of milk. Excluding dairy and packaging purchases, however, our VLS spend percentage rose in 2007 for the first time in several years. This occurred because we began to phase in Certified Humane cage-free eggs in 2007, the first part of a four-year commitment. We continue to work on new metrics to gauge the success and impact of our Values-Led Sourcing initiatives. We haven’t completed the work we began on this in 2006, in part because of the additional challenges to extend our analysis to our global supply chain, and the difficulty of the creating flexible and meaningful metrics. We still believe that these metrics will be a valuable tool as we make decisions about VLS going forward. We also continue to seek a balance between our mission-driven desire to support forward-thinking suppliers and our need to keep costs down in our supply chain. When we find solutions that satisfy both goals, we know we’re on the right track. In 2007, rising commodity prices around the world presented a big challenge in this regard, and we may see more of the same ahead in 2008. In any case, we expect our overall VLS spending to increase slightly as we maintain our current initiatives and continue to phase in Certified Humane Cage-Free Eggs between now and 2010. We do not have any major new values-led sourcing initiatives in the pipeline for 2008. Outside of our Values-Led Sourcing initiatives, all of the suppliers for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream are expected to follow practices consistent with the Code of Business Principles of our parent company, Unilever. This code includes: continuous improvement in managing environmental impacts, safe and healthy standards for workers, and a firm commitment to human rights, among other things. Unilever is also a signatory to the UN Secretary General’s Global Compact of 1999 which commits the company to support and respect human rights within our sphere of influence. New VLS initiatives for 2007! Western U.S. Production Gets rBGH-free milk and cream When we opened a new Ben & Jerry’s production line in an existing Unilever ice cream facility in Henderson, Nevada, in June of 2007, we made sure to connect with family farmers who could pledge to supply us with milk and cream from cows not treated with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). More Fair Trade Sourcing In 2007, we expanded our purchasing of Fair Trade certified ingredients in our global supply chain. For the United States market, we transitioned the vanilla extract in our smooth Vanilla ice cream — and the cocoa powder in our smooth Chocolate ice cream — to Fair Trade Certified suppliers. In the European market, we added Chunky Monkey (with Fairtrade banana puree, sugar, and cocoa powder) and Vanilla Toffee Crunch (with Fairtrade vanilla, sugar, and cocoa powder) to our list of Fairtrade certified flavours. Transition to Cage-Free Eggs in U.S. We began a four-year transition to Certified Humane Cage-Free suppliers for all of the eggs used in our U.S. ice cream production in 2007. We’ll continue to use free-range eggs for 100% of our European production. |
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