ZURICH, Switzerland – The Barry Callebaut Group, a world’s leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa products, announces the publication of its Cocoa Sustainability Report 2013/14. This year’s report illustrates the company’s initiatives to improve the livelihoods of cocoa farmers through sustainable cocoa farming practices and to address the basic health and education needs of cocoa communities.
“With ongoing challenges in cocoa farming, we are focusing on helping farmers to improve their yields, in order to increase overall production and enhance their livelihoods ” said Juergen Steinemann, CEO of the Barry Callebaut Group. “In order to achieve this faster and with more impact, we implement and push the CocoaAction plan of the World Cocoa Foundation. We need to make cocoa farming sustainable, and we will.”
Besides describing the Group’s ongoing cocoa sustainability programs, the report highlights five major developments in the company’s strategy and activities during its fiscal year 2013/14:
- In December 2013, the Cocoa Horizons Truck started its journey across Côte d’Ivoire to bring farmer training, education and medical assistance to remote cocoa communities. It reached 21,000 people in its first 8 months.
- In February 2014, the company completed the acquisition of the Biolands Group, which works directly with 63,000 farmers across Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone to help them produce certified cocoa.
- The Barry Callebaut Group also expanded and strengthened its Quality Partner Program (QPP), the Group’s own offering of sustainable cocoa products. Traceability, verification and transparency will become key specifications of QPP going forward.
- The Group is one of the twelve founding members of CocoaAction, an unprecedented industry strategy to modernize the cocoa sector, announced in May 2014.
- In June 2014, the Group organized the second Chocovision 2014 conference, where 200 senior leaders and stakeholders across the cocoa value chain came together to explore and initiate new approaches and solutions for a sustainable, successful chocolate future.
The Cocoa Sustainability Report 2013/14 was guided by the AA1000 standard for sustainability reporting and was externally verified by the auditing organization Denkstatt GmbH.
The complete report can be downloaded here.
