Our journey of positive impact

In the past decade we have worked tirelessly on a set of goals to build a better future for generations to come. And we have achieved a lot both as a company and as a cooperative. We, for instance, have implemented a carbon footprint monitor that measures greenhouse gas emissions on each and every individual member dairy farm. We also built the world’s first tool that helps our farmers calculate the impact of sustainability measures aimed at, for example, improving biodiversity. In that way we measure and reward the many achievements of our member farmers. And we look beyond that. In the past years we have helped to improve the livelihood of thousands of farmers worldwide through Dairy Development. Next to that, we have continuously made improvements towards circular supply chain processes and have taken steps to even further improve the nutritional value of our products worldwide. 

In the past years a lot of good was done but the planet still is under pressure. The global population keeps growing fast and needs feeding. We as FrieslandCampina know we are part of the solution. We want to create a sustainable future for our children by keeping people, animals and our planet healthy. There is no time to lose. This is the decade of action. A decade during which FrieslandCampina accelerates further to provide good nutrition in balance with nature. That balance to us means we go for carbon neutrality and positive biodiversity. And that we make production processes fully circular. It means we continue on our path towards farming for the future. And all this can only be done if we provide a good living for farmers, for generations to come.

To realise all this, we take our typical FrieslandCampina approach of cooperative sustainability. We are part of a cooperative. That means we work together, for the long-term, with relevant parties such as NGOs, customers and consumers, to truly make a positive impact. We make processes measurable and we monitor, so we act in the right direction. That is because we do not like guessing, we like knowing we do the right things.

That has been our approach for many situations, like the biodiversity monitor, we developed jointly with WNF and Rabobank. And the Annual Nutrient Cycling Assessment, implementing the carbon footprint monitor we developed. But also for the Dairy Sustainable Framework (DSF), of which FrieslandCampina is one of the co-founders.

The DSF is a monitoring and reporting initiative that tracks the continuous improvement of the eleven DSF sustainability criteria. This framework is also used for the Sustainable Dairy Partnership which gives clear insights into the sustainability stage a dairy producer is at.

Many FrieslandCampina employees work hard every day in the field of sustainability. From dedicated teams for our member farmers to support them with continuous improvement up to R&D teams, procurement teams and supply chain experts. Our sustainability strategy is interwoven in the entire organisation, with a governance structure in place, periodically reporting on progress internally and externally. FrieslandCampina’s Executive Board has final responsibility for the sustainability policy and the development and coordination of this policy are the responsibility of the Corporate Sustainability department. The Sustainability Council is responsible for assessment and consultation.