Liam Dowd sits down Dirk Jan de With of Unilever to discuss the upcoming issues and priorities in sustainable sourcing
Dirk Jan de With is the vice president of procurement ingredients and sustainability at Unilever. Dirk Jan has worked at Unilever for 25 years, in Supply Chain roles in Foods and HPC. Dirk Jan is also the President of the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative (SAI).
As part of the knowledge exchange for this year's Sustainable Supply Chain Summit, we asked Dirk Jan to share his thoughts and priorities around the below questions...
Ethical Corporation: Tell us, in a sentence, what it is you do?
Dirk Jan de With: At Unilever I am Responsible for the procurement of Ingredients globally and for the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan Sustainable Sourcing agenda.
Ethical Corporation: At your recent Partner to Win Supplier Summit Unilever stated that it’s looking to improve the lives of one million people, through influence over your extended supply chain. How are you looking to achieve this?
Dirk Jan de With: In September we started a strategic partnership with the NGO, Solidaridad.
The partnership will be focused on promoting gender equity, improving agricultural and labour practices as well as supporting young agricultural entrepreneurs and land management. It will be targeted at sustainably sourcing key agricultural raw materials (tea, cocoa, sugar, palm oil, fruit and vegetables, soy and dairy) in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
Ethical Corporation: Could you please share how you intend on rolling out your environmental best practices?
Dirk Jan de With: If you take palm oil for example. Unilever significantly reduced (by half) complexity in its supply base.
Our first step is to get traceability back to all the palm oil mills we source from. This means that suppliers need to make transparent to us the exact mills the palm oil is coming from, so we can then make Unilever’s sourcing origin transparent.
Unilever has been engaging with our suppliers since the start of this year, to help them understand how we need to work together to transform the industry.
This has been through face to face workshops and meetings, to really help them understand the issues and now the majority of our supplies are fully on board with traceability.
We have also made the reduction in our supplier base no secret, so suppliers know that we are only working with companies that are committed to this.
Ethical Corporation: Do you have timeline and metrics in place to measure the success?
Dirk Jan de With: In addition, we will work with suppliers to develop individual time-bound plans that support our commitment. Our metrics are also available in the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan annual report.Printer-friendly version