Unilever tops the Tomorrow’s Value Rating of the food and beverage sector with a comprehensive sustainability strategy underpinned by solid management systems, says new research from The Tomorrow’s Value Rating. Thomas Krick, global manager of the Tomorrow’s Value Rating, comments: “Unilever’s sustainability strategy is based on stakeholder feedback, governed by the company’s senior leaders, and its performance on important variables such as carbon emissions and water usage has shown marked improvements over recent years."

And further: “The company has demonstrated leadership by co-founding initiatives such as the Marine Stewardship Council and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil; it was an early supporter of fairtrade, and started rolling out nutritional labelling practices before most of its competitors.”

Social and environmental concerns, as well as growing worries about the impacts of climate change and water scarcity, encourage the industry’s increasing efforts in this area. Furthermore, growing numbers of potential customers in emerging markets motivate companies to develop new products and distribution models for challenging socio-economic circumstances.

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Opinion:

Congratulations, Unilever, for this top rank, which clearly suggests that you are doing better in terms of sustainability than your sector peers. Does it mean that your business practices are sustainable now? Certainly not. So wide reaching and unclear are they, that sustainability efforts at one place might simply serve to cover the very opposite elsewhere. Never mind, together we'll find out and make sure that your and our all future will be sustainable - eventually.

Picture credit: havankevin