Barry Callebaut has announced that in fiscal year 2018/19 it sourced 51 percent of its ingredients sustainably, up from 44 percent the previous year.

This sourcing achievement is highlighted in Barry Callebaut’s Forever Chocolate Progress Report 2018/19, its third progress report since the launch of its Forever Chocolate plan in 2016, tracking the Group’s progress toward making sustainable chocolate the norm.

“With over half of our ingredients coming from sustainable sources, we are well on track to have 100% sustainable chocolate by 2025,” said Antoine de Saint-Affrique, CEO of the Barry Callebaut Group. “This is a great achievement and it demonstrates that sustainability is at the heart of our business strategy.”

Forever Chocolate is based on four targets, to be achieved by 2025, that address the largest sustainability challenges in the chocolate supply chain:

1. More than 500,000 cocoa farmers will have been lifted out of poverty
2. Eradicate child labor from the supply chain
3. Become carbon and forest positive
4. Have 100% sustainable ingredients in all products

Milestones achieved in 2018/19

100% sustainable chocolate by 2025
Of all the agricultural raw materials Barry Callebaut sourced, 51 percent were sustainably sourced in 2018/19. The company sourced 47 percent  (2017/18: 44 percent) of its cocoa beans through sustainability programs. This percentage includes the company’s Cocoa Horizons program, as well as its customers’ own programs and external certification organizations such as UTZ Certified, Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade and Organic.

Furthermore, Barry Callebaut sourced 54 percent (2017/18: 44 percent) of its non-cocoa agricultural raw materials sustainably. This includes the use of sustainability certification schemes for the respective ingredients.

More than 500,000 cocoa farmers have been lifted out of poverty by 2025
In order to have more than 500,000 cocoa farmers lifted out of poverty by 2025, Barry Callebaut is mapping the cocoa farms in its supply chain. As of end 2018/19 the company had full data on 176,984 farms and their farmers entered into its Katchilè database. This database provides key insights into the location, farm size, socio-economic and household data of cocoa farms and their farmers. 

This data allows Barry Callebaut to offer tailor-made advice at individual farm level on how to improve productivity via Farm Business Plans and Farm Services. Over 16,000 farmers have adopted Farm Business Plans and 49,909 (+303 percent) farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Brazil and Indonesia have access to farm services, including coaching as well as other inputs such as tools, seedlings and finance. 

The premiums from the purchase of HORIZONS products generated CHF 15 million in funds (+40 percent). These premiums allowed more than 135,000 farmers to take part in programs focusing on improving their productivity and income. These premiums also financed child labor sensitization programs, training 27,448 farmers. Measured against the World Bank’s threshold of $1.90/day, Barry Callebaut estimates that 184,623 cocoa farmers in its supply chain have been lifted out of poverty.

Eradicate child labor in the Barry Callebaut supply chain by 2025
Barry Callebaut rolled out child labor monitoring and remediation systems in its direct cocoa supply chain that now cover 42 farmer groups, including 16,710 farmers, in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.

Including the farmer groups that have monitoring and remediation systems in place administered by third parties (i.e. UTZ Certified), in total 26 percent of the farmer groups the company  directly sourced from in 2018/19 had systems in place to prevent, monitor and remediate child labor, an increase of +116 percent. 37 perent of the cocoa and non-cocoa volume Barry Callebaut sourced from third-party suppliers had equivalent child labor monitoring systems in place.

Barry Callebaut identified in the fiscal year under review 3,867 cases of child labor (-9 percent) in its cocoa supply chain. All cases involved children helping on the family farm that fell under the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) definition of the worst forms of child labor. For all identified cases remediation is being prepared and for 2,333 of the reported cases remediation has been activated.

Become carbon and forest positive by 2025
In pursuit of its target to store more carbon emissions than it produces by 2025, Barry Callebaut reduced in 2018/19 its corporate CO2 equivalent (CO2e) footprint from 9.10 million tonnes to 8.49 million tonnes in fiscal year 2018/19 (-6.7%), while achieving +5.1 percent volume growth.

The main drivers of this achievement were reduced CO2e emissions from land use change, reduced CO2e intensity in factories and reduced CO2e intensity in dairy products. The CO2e intensity per tonne of product also decreased from 4.45 to 3.92, and additional contributions from scope 3 insetting projects lowered this even further to 3.88 (-13 percent). Of the company’s factories, 17 out of 62 are now running on 100% renewable energy.

In Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the company has mapped cocoa farms within 25 kilometers from protected forest areas in its direct supply chain, in total 47,182. In addition, Barry Callebaut distributed over 1.8 million young cocoa seedlings in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Furthermore, the company distributed almost 750,000 shade trees for replanting in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. 

Through its support for the “Initiative For Sustainable Landscapes” (ISLA) project in Côte d’Ivoire, Barry Callebaut helped to protect 6,280 hectares of primary forest and restored 3,800 hectares of forest by removing illegal cocoa operations and allowing natural forest regeneration. The percentage of raw materials sourced by the Group demonstrated not to be contributing to deforestation is 37.6 percent.

Third party assurance
Barry Callebaut’s Forever Chocolate progress report 2018/19 and the GRI REPORT 2018/19, prepared in accordance with the GRI standards, Core option, were subject to independent assurance by PwC.

For a full overview of the 2018/19 Forever Chocolate progress results visit: forever-chocolate.barry-callebaut.com/