ethical sourcing and procurement

We make brands with high quality ingredients and use packaging and services to help deliver our products in first class condition. We work with thousands of suppliers to ensure the quality of our goods and that we buy from ethical and increasingly sustainable sources. It is what both we and our consumers expect.

Sourcing products and services from around the world

Creating the brands people love requires a host of ingredients and different packaging. We need the right quality of ingredients to produce tasty, safe, high quality products, and fit for purpose packaging to ensure their freshness and quality. Consumers expect this from us every time they buy our products.

Besides the ingredients and packaging for our products, we need the equipment necessary for us to conduct our business: for example, plant and machinery, desks and phones. We need to buy in services too, whether it is advertising for our products or training for our colleagues.

We buy directly from about 40,000 suppliers from around the world. Approximately half of our spend is on ingredients and packaging.

We have two goals on sourcing: to maintain our ethical sourcing standards, and develop sustainable sourcing programmes for our agricultural raw materials.

Our strategic sourcing process

We have developed a Strategic Sourcing Process to guide our procurement activities. This process takes into account cost, quality, safety, the nature and reliability of the source, environmental impacts and workplace practices. By having comprehensive, robust processes we can monitor our procurement activities closely and continuously improve them.

To help us manage our global purchasing operation we have a procurement function of around 270 employees.

We use Group Quality Management Systems. These systems help us buy our goods and services by monitoring both the quality of the ingredients in our products and the quality standards of our suppliers providing them. They also apply to our own company sites.

Some ingredients and packaging we source

INGREDIENTS

ITEM	HOW WE USE THESE
Cocoa	Key ingredient of our chocolate
Dairy products	Putting the milk into milk chocolate
Flavours	Using more natural flavours to meet the changing tastes of consumers
Fruit	Including apples for Mott’s and fruit for Snapple and Cottee’s, for example
Sugar	Natural sugar to make our products sweet
Sweeteners	Reducing natural sugar to meet growing demand for alternative sweeteners

PACKAGING

ITEM	HOW WE USE THESE
Film	For wrapping and protecting our products
Glass	Bottles for our drinks
Paper and corrugated board	For protecting and carrying products, and for cases to get products to shops
Rigid plastic (PET)	Bottles and cartons for our drinks

Sustainability

Our aim is to make sure our products are carefully sourced and produced in a sustainable manner. Our ingredients, goods and services also need to be sourced in ways that both support security of supply for the long-term and address questions of sustainability. For us this includes economic, environmental, social and labour conditions.

As part of our approach to sustainable sourcing, we consider all those involved in producing our products and ingredients. Our Human Rights & Ethical Trading (HRET) policy sets out the guidelines that apply both within Cadbury Schweppes and to our suppliers. It is based on the highest international standards, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and International Labour Organisation conventions. We have a set of Ethical Sourcing Standards for our suppliers which sets out what this means for them.

We regularly review and update our ethical sourcing and sustainability activity to ensure it consistently meets the high standards we require. During the next few years, we are committed to further development in these areas with our supply chain partners and to building on our sustainable sourcing programmes for agricultural raw materials.