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Last update: march 2010
Danone’s products are directly in line with nature’s cycles. Therefore, in order to accomplish its mission of providing healthy food products to as many people as possible, the group feels it is essential that they are involved in safeguarding ecosystems. This commitment is also a means of responding to their consumers’ current and future demands.
In 2008, with most of its long term environmental objectives attained (particularly where reducing water and energy consumption was concerned), Danone decided to go even further. The group identified the 5 five areas where its environmental impact is most significant – climate risk, packaging, the protection of water, agriculture and biodiversity – and is giving itself new objectives. The aim is to rapidly transform the business; Danone has therefore chosen to take CO² as an indicator of this evolution. CO² has been chosen as it is a synthetic indicator which ‘leads to’ a large amount of environmental indicators.
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Transforming the business implies being able to measure the impact of one’s actions. Since no such tool existed which was adapted for its type of activity, Danone implemented their own, ‘Danprint’. This tool has been certified by three independent organizations :
- PriceWaterhouseCooper,
- the Carbon Trust,
- the ADEME (French Environmental and Energy Control Agency).
It has been developed by the EAU Cluster and deployed throughout the group’s centers of activity – the PLF center in 2008 and the Infant Nutrition & Medical center in 2009. Danone’s objective now is to build an exhaustive database, which can be compared between countries, will measure emissions, pick out the best practices and monitor the carrying out of reduction objectives.
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To support the deployment of Danprint, Danone has set up a specific structure which incorporates environmental concerns into their business decisions – the nomination of two Nature Sponsors within the Executive Committee, the setting up of a Nature Management department (including an MD from the world of business) reporting directly to the group’s Executive Committee, the deployment of Environment Directors in all of their business activities, and the creation of a Nature Finance Management department.
In the same way, a community of 110 ‘Carbon Masters’ (Carbon Reduction plan coordinators within each subsidiary) has been created. In addition, each subsidiary MD and each group director has had a carbon impact reduction objective as part of their bonus deal since 2008. Finally, CO² is also included as part of the KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) for the business’ core decision making bodies (Capex, innovation, etc).
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Danone is basing its actions on 3 beliefs:
- Responses don’t need to be purely ‘environmental’; it is the structure of social, societal and environmental components which in the end will have an impact over time.
- Transformation will draw its solutions from co-creation. It is necessary to overcome the contradictions which can exist (as is the case to an extent everywhere) between businesses and organizations in civil society which work towards the same aims. It is this collaboration which governs tomorrow’s responses and which will end up influencing political governance.
- Finally, transformation depends on the ability of a business to lead all the parties it works with on a day to day basis – farmers, milk producers, suppliers, etc.