Barry Callebaut, a leading manufacturer of high-quality chocolate and cocoa products, has announced that 44% of the cocoa and 44% of the other ingredients that the group uses for its products are sustainably sourced. “With now 44% of our ingredients coming from sustainable sources, we are well on track to make sustainable chocolate the norm by 2025,” says Antoine de Saint-Affrique, chief executive officer of the Barry Callebaut Group. “Through our sourcing, processing and sales, we are driving change, supporting cocoa farming communities and driving the uptake of sustainably sourced chocolate.”
Barry Callebaut’s Forever Chocolate is based on four ambitious targets to be achieved by 2025 that address the largest sustainability challenges in the chocolate supply chain:
• Lift more than 500,000 cocoa farmers out of poverty
• Eradicate child labor from its supply chain
• Become carbon and forest positive
• Have 100% sustainable ingredients in all its products
The company’s sustainable products include its Cocoa Horizons program, as well as its customers’ own programs and external certification such as UTZ Certified, Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade and Organic. Furthermore, Barry Callebaut sourced 44% of its non-cocoa agricultural raw materials sustainably. This includes the use of sustainability certification schemes for the respective ingredients.
In order to lift more than 500,000 farmers out of poverty, Barry Callebaut announced that it is building datasets with detailed location, agronomic, economic and social survey data on the cocoa farms in its supply chain. More than 130,000 farms have already been mapped. These unique datasets allow Barry Callebaut to ensure that the mapped cocoa farms are not located in protected forest areas. In addition, they allow the company to create tailor-made sustainability programs to help address the key issues of the mapped cocoa farming communities. As part of its work with farmers, the group distributed over 2.1 million young cocoa seedlings, as well as close to 400,000 shade trees. In 2017-18, 12,395 farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Brazil and Indonesia participated in Barry Callebaut’s Farm Services business. They received coaching and other inputs such as tools and seedlings or support to access finance. Furthermore, the group supported cocoa farmers in replanting 281 hectares (+60%) with young cocoa trees, as well as other crops that provide shade, and help cocoa farmers to diversify their income.
With the support of ICI, Barry Callebaut continues to implement monitoring and remediation systems designed to eradicate child labor. This constitutes on-the-ground household and farm visits to survey practices concerning child employment and education in cocoa farming communities. These surveys identify children performing hazardous tasks and allow well-founded estimates of the prevalence of the worst forms of child labor to be made. In 2017-18, the group conducted monitoring and remediation in 21 farmer groups covering 12,018 farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Barry Callebaut established that 12% of the farmer groups it directly sources from in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana have systems in place to prevent, monitor and remediate child labor.
In order to become carbon positive, Barry Callebaut not only looks at the carbon footprint created by its own operations (scope 1) and energy use (scope 2), but also takes into account the carbon footprint of the entire supply chain (scope 3), including the production and processing of all raw materials and related land use changes. The carbon footprint of the group’s supply chain from farm to customer was 9.1 million tons of CO2e in 2017-18. Of the group’s factories, 14 out of 59 (24%) are now running on 100% renewable energy.
