The value of Associated British Foods to society is overwhelmingly in the business it transacts. We play a positive role in contributing to the quality of people’s lives by providing food and clothing, ever competing to make these better. We have always sought to do so in ways that are socially and environmentally responsible. This has been part of our culture and we have been reporting the group’s performance on health, safety and the environment for the past seven years. Now we are launching our first corporate responsibility report.
Over the years we have grown into a diversified international food, ingredients and retail group, and we have focused more on the ‘responsibility’ than on the ‘corporate’. We are committed to sustainability – whether in providing healthcare for our employees in Africa or in deriving half of our energy consumption around the world from renewable sources.
We are a highly decentralised group – currently employing 102,000 people in 46 countries – united by four overarching business principles: managing our environmental impact; taking care of our people; fostering ethical business relationships; and being good neighbours. These govern our detailed business principles set out here.
These principles extend to all sites, in all countries and at every level of our organisation. We believe that their universal application increases the strength of our businesses and our brands but we also believe in allowing individual businesses and managers the freedom to meet local circumstances and to be innovative.
Our culture is, and will remain, one where the centre directs with a light touch. From baking bread to making high street fashion affordable, it is our people and our products in a wide range of different businesses that make us successful.
Without imposing central edicts, we have taken a number of steps with the aim of ensuring that our core values are fully implemented throughout the group – from board member to the shop floor.
We want to continue to ensure that each business takes its own responsibilities seriously and acts in the most appropriate way to meet our high standards. However, we also consider, on a case-by-case basis, whether there are particular corporate responsibility (CR) policies that are best adopted throughout the group, as we have done this year on palm oil. As part of our move towards a more holistic CR approach, in February 2010 we held our first groupwide CR day to share ideas and best practice across the businesses. This follows annual sustainability conferences held by our Grocery group in 2009 and 2010.
One particular area upon which we will concentrate at group level, as well as in every business, is health and safety. This has always been of particular importance to us but clearly with four deaths on our premises, four from traffic accidents, and two in unique circumstances, this year has been unprecedented and is unacceptable.
Now that so many of our businesses are doing so much in this arena, our reporting will include more information on our people, our suppliers, our customers and our products. For Associated British Foods, as with other companies, CR is a journey with improvement every year. We therefore intend to publish a full CR report every three years with more frequent updates online. By measuring and recording our performance in this way we hope to give internal and external stakeholders a clearer picture of our commitment to CR and of what we are doing to drive continuing improvement.
George Weston
Chief Executive