Working with Suppliers - Ethical Sourcing
What we and our consumers expect
People love the taste, the quality and the value of our products. They expect our brands to have been produced with integrity, where decent labour standards exist, with straight dealing in business transactions and a fair price for goods, services and labour has been paid. Increasingly, customers expect our products to come from sustainable sources and be produced without significant environmental impact. Increasingly, consumers expect companies to source ethically and in a sustainable manner, and these are firm Cadbury commitments.
Our supplier assessment processes
Our supplier assessment processes help us monitor and manage performance. These processes include desk-based risk review, site-based assessment, and verification. Our ethical sourcing team works closely with our procurement and quality teams, and has overall responsibility for these processes.
Our commitments for the future
We are committed to ensuring our direct suppliers meet our ethical sourcing standards by 2010. We will do this with our higher risk suppliers through active supplier self-assessments via SEDEX plus sample independent audits. This will likely involve about 3,000 suppliers. For the remaining approximate 37,000 suppliers, we will make them aware of our standards and encourage them to work towards them through self-development and SEDEX self-assessment.
We are further committed to sustainably sourcing at least half of our key agricultural raw materials such as cocoa, sugar, palm oil and gum arabic, for our core brands by the end of the decade. We will do this by working with supply chain partners including NGOs, farmers, scientists, government, trade associations and multi-stakeholder groups.
See more information on our Ethical Sourcing Standards.