In a challenging 2023, shaped by an uncertain economy and continued geo-political tensions, Vandemoortele achieved excellent results, not only financially but also within our sustainability programme.
Aurélie Comhaire, Group Sustainability Manager, walks us through the key achievements of last year: “Our sourcing efforts were among the most notable: we reached our sustainable sourcing targets for various raw materials, from palm oil to cocoa. The grievance mechanism we launched will ensure the further improvement of our supply chain. We are also coming up to speed in terms of carbon reduction. We also made further progress for our Clean Label target: nearly 80% of the bakery products we sold were Clean Label. In addition, we dedicated considerable effort to developing our climate targets, in line with the Science Based Target initiative (SBTi).”
"With regard to our associates, we managed to further close the gender pay gap, and we upped the number of training hours per associate. Sustainability is now well embedded in all our processes and procedures. Our increased efforts to promote associate engagement are also paying off: our latest Associate Engagement Survey shows that our associates have become even more committed and that their sense of well-being has further improved” says Marc Croonen, Chief Human Resources, Sustainability & Communication.
2023 was a year of transition for Vandemoortele: presenting our updated sustainability strategy.
To comply with the CSRD requirements, the new European corporate sustainability reporting directive, we also updated our sustainability strategy in 2023. In the course of a few months, we conducted a very broad and in-depth consultation exercise, followed by a double materiality analysis. The results affirmed the importance of the existing focus points, but prompted the company to add some new highlights and priorities. The new approach will serve as a compass to ensure CSRD compliance in the future.
Yvon Guerin, CEO: "Even with the CSRD exercise going on in the background, we still made a lot of progress on our existing sustainability targets and KPIs".
