Nestlé discloses soy, meat, vanilla and hazelnut suppliers to accelerate transparency

Nestlé is accelerating its journey towards reaching full supply chain transparency by disclosing the list of its suppliers alongside a variety of data on its 15 priority commodities. These commodities cover 95 percent of the company’s annual sourcing of raw materials. This is reportedly the first disclosure of its kind in the industry and comes at a time when global consumers demand to know exactly what is in their food and where it comes from.

“Transparency in our supply chains is essential and we will continue to lead in this area. Following the public disclosure of our palm oil and pulp and paper supply chains last year, we are now pleased to release supply chain information for soya, meat (beef, pork, veal, lamb/mutton), hazelnuts and vanilla,” explains Magdi Batato, Executive Vice President, Head of Operations at Nestlé.

“Consumers want to know what is in their food and where it comes from. We are committed to providing them with this information. We also aim to drive industry-wide transparency, and we hope that our move will encourage others to follow suit, making transparency the industry norm,” a Nestlé spokesperson tells FoodIngredientsFirst. 

In 2018, Nestlé disclosed the supply chain information of palm oil, pulp and paper. “We are now pleased to release supply chain information for four additional categories. By mid-2019, we will also publish the supply chain information for our other priority commodities which include seafood, coconut, vegetables, spices, coffee, cocoa, dairy, poultry, eggs, cereals and sugar,” notes the spokesperson.

The disclosure includes the list of direct suppliers, upstream locations and country of origins as well as total volume sourced for each commodity, according to Nestlé.

In September 2018, FoodIngredientsFirst reported that Nestlé was stepping up its game in no-deforestation commitments by becoming the first food company to use a high-tech satellite-based service to monitor its palm oil supply chains. In a bid to distance itself from the controversy associated with deforestation and to hit its 2020 no-deforestation targets, Nestlé implemented Starling, a global verification system using cutting-edge technology combining high-resolution radar and optical satellite imagery to provide constant unbiased monitoring of land cover changes and forest cover disturbances.

However, the Swiss food giant was itself suspended from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in June 2018, for breaching its code of conduct. Nestlé said at the time that the organization’s approach “is not conducive to achieving the levels of industry transparency and transformation the sector so urgently needs” and pointed out that although the company shares RSPO’s ambition for improving the social and environmental performance of the palm oil sector, “our approaches to this do differ.”

The following month, the sustainable palm oil body reinstated Nestlé’s membership after the company submitted its action plan to achieve 100 percent RSPO-certified sustainable palm oil.