Communities

Our business wouldn’t exist without the communities where we source from and in which we operate. We want to ensure that local people benefit from working with us.

Watch our CEO Gilles Andrier talk about communities
 

By responding to the needs within communities and using our business expertise as a force for good, we can improve lives through projects that support everything from health and education to enhancing environmental and agricultural practices.

The work of the Givaudan Foundation supports projects as diverse as a community garden in Milan, family meal boxes in Milton Keynes, UK, and health and nutrition workshops for vulnerable families in Colombia. All are steps on the road to realising our ambition to improve the lives of millions of people in communities where we source and operate by 2030.

Protecting communities during the pandemic

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic added a never-before-seen urgency to our community support. From the outset of the pandemic, we put in place comprehensive health and safety measures to protect our colleagues. In March 2020, we donated at least CHF 1 million to the Givaudan COVID-19 Communities Fund. We asked our employees to nominate communities, charities or services around the world that needed additional support. Medical and other essential supplies, expertise, services: whatever our communities required, the fund did its best to provide. We are not yet out of this crisis but by sustaining our communities, we can more confidently envisage a future in which everyone continues to prosper. 

2030 is also the date by when we will source all materials and services – naturals, synthetics and Indirect Materials and Services (IM&S) – in a way that protects people and the environment. This builds upon the significant shifts we have already made to our responsible sourcing practices, from encouraging sustainable food production systems and resilient agricultural practices, to deploying field teams and mapping materials in several supply chains in order to provide full-cycle transparency.

Sustainable practices and livelihoods

We work directly with local smallholder farmers, intermediate suppliers and partners to secure the long-term supply of the – often vulnerable – raw materials of natural origin we rely on. Our field teams travel to remote sourcing regions all over the world, cultivating personal relationships with producers that enable us to build trust and work together to ensure the long-term future of raw materials. Our work also contributes to more stable incomes to help improve the lives of these communities. When our teams can’t be in the field, we bring transparency and stability to our supply chains by partnering with direct suppliers on improved sourcing models.

Green Teams 

In addition, our internal grass-roots initiative Green Teams, empowers and encourages local groups of employees to identify local opportunities to drive forward our sustainability and purpose ambitions as well as raise awareness of existing sustainable operations across Givaudan and deliver results. Their achievements include reducing the use of fresh solvents from cleaning processes in our site in Sant Celoni, Spain, reducing waste by 100 tonnes/year and saving EUR 129,000, to a reforestation project in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where employees planted 400 trees. Green Teams make an impact across our entire organisation through sharing best practice from site to site and actively promoting a Company-wide green attitude.