04 COCOA SUSTAINABILITY
referring to a BBC Panorama documentary investigation in 2010 into child labour in the cocoa industry which found that there really is no guarantee that child labour has not been involved in the supply chain, even for certified products. Despite this, Ferrero are involved with ongoing collaborations with the schemes in an effort to find solutions. “We want to test these systems to see how they work and then decide how we want to proceed further. The best way is to try them out,” Cagli reasons. “It’s not like we are sitting around and not doing anything at all. It’s a process, it’s a journey.” There are two broad categories of cocoa
initiatives that Ferrero support. One is the category of global partnership initiatives. “Here we collaborate with funding the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) and the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF),” Cagli confirms. “We’re also full supporters of the Harkin-Engel Protocol, started by Eliot Engel and Tom Harkin in the US, which aims at ensuring that cocoa beans and their derivative products are grown and processed in compliance with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention concerning the elimination of the ‘worst forms of child labour’. We believe global partnerships are absolutely necessary because industry alone
cannot go into sovereign countries and tell people how to change their laws and their practices, this is something that takes time and needs to be done through these global partnerships.” As well as global partnership initiatives, Ferrero are also engaged in local partnership projects in various countries, such as Source Trust in Ghana (
www.sourcetrust.org) and Touton in Côte d’Ivoire (
www.touton.fr). Private partnerships between food
manufacturers and cocoa farmers are very important, according to Cagli. “Most of all to ensure traceability of cocoa beans, because traceability is fundamental. You cannot have any type of sustainability certification if you don’t know for sure where the cocoa beans come from, so these types of partnership are very important for this.” Ferrero want to help cocoa farmers to put together a sustainable business, rather than just pick and harvest, so to speak. “What we’re trying to help to teach them is all about risk management and diversification, because we would like them not to be 100 per cent dependent on only one crop, such as cocoa.” “There is something in particular that you
should know about Ferrero,” Cagli confides. “We grind our own cocoa. In other words, we rarely
buy semi-finished cocoa products. We buy the cocoa beans and we grind them ourselves, which puts us in a relatively specific situation compared to other chocolate producers that buy semi-finished products. We have a contractual clause which is part of our standard contract with our suppliers, where we want to be reassured that they all respect the applicable conventions against the ‘worst forms of child labour’, as defined by the International Labour Organisation. As a company, Ferrero also conducts periodic audits on their suppliers. “We are not just content that they sign the clause, we also check to verify what concrete steps they put into practice to ensure that this clause is respected.” In their next CSR report, Ferrero will
announce that they are putting into practice a specific code of business conduct, applicable to all Ferrero’s business to business operations. “This will be a step forward in the sense of having a global instrument to guide our business conduct in the supply chain,” Cagli anticipates. “It will also be applicable to the distributors of our products. The two main targets will be suppliers and distributors, an all-in-one code with separate sections for each of them.”
Zotter®
, an Austrian chocolatier famous for its Balleros®
,
needed a better pan coating system to apply chocolate coatings and boost production. Our fully-jacketed AccuCoat®
Chocolate images provided by Zotter.
System uses closed loop temperature control to ensure uniform coverage of even the most viscous coatings. The system also controls cooling air to set the chocolate and stores multiple recipes for quick production changeover.
The results:
AccuCoat Pan Spraying System
Pan Spraying
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10