View from the industry: Ferrero
Ferrero began its journey in the small town of Alba in Piedmont, Italy, in 1946. Today, it is one of the world’s largest sweet-packaged food companies, with over 35 iconic brands sold in more than 170 countries.
We spoke to Nicola Somenzi, Head of Responsible Sourcing at Ferrero, about how Ferrero aims to create a thriving supply chain that benefits farmers and their communities and protects people and the environment.
Nicola Somenzi : What are the key drivers to achieving a leaner and greener supply chain? In the food and beverage sector, the need to move to more lean and sustainable approaches also comes from the increased and renewed consumers’ sustainability sentiment. People are looking at companies to act towards sustainability efforts, expecting them to step up and lead the way for change.
Our key commodities, like hazelnut, cocoa, and palm oil, have dedicated charters, where our goals and ambitions are clearly set with concrete targets.
In our daily job, we try to address questions like - what do we want to achieve in due diligence? What kind of visibility do we want to have on the supply chain? What standards are we using? In which parts of our supply chain, we need to invest directly?
We are trying to assess what mitigations we might need to commit to, so that our ambitions, principles, and targets can be achieved.
Now the regulation is coming together, and that regulation is ambitious. Europe is leading in this process, while US is quickly catching up.
At Ferrero, we have increased our level of controls and visibility of supply chains to ensure the highest level of compliance. This increased level of digitalization across supply chain has deeply changed the way we work with our suppliers.
We have been clear with suppliers – we are no longer buying goods or commodities. There must be some information and data attached in a structured way, otherwise it has less value.
In many cases, it would be impossible for us to source these commodities without this additional information because we deal with thousands of suppliers. More than this, for the systems carrying this additional information to work properly, data must be verified. This is becoming part of the selection process and negotiation between suppliers and clients, meaning that this is not simply a calculation on costs alone, but is the way to embed sustainability into the business.
