Fresh & Ingredients

Publicity surrounding environmental impact, deplorable working conditions, food safety, health and safety issues, and low wages in many producer countries have increased consumers’ interest in knowing where their products originate from and under what conditions they are produced.

The F&I program brings together more than 100 suppliers – securing future supply – and will mobilize demand from retailers, manufacturers and traders to increase responsible sourcing and stimulate practices in their supply chains.

Partner companies benefit from synergies in sustainability strategies, investments, and learning from the different categories. By participating in the program, partners boost their sustainability efforts and strengthen their company’s sustainable position. Other reasons why companies participate are:

The Fresh & Ingredients program drives sustainability through pre-competitive collaborations. 

The Fresh & Ingredients Program prioritizes four focus topics for intervention for the coming years (2016-2020):

1. Smallholder inclusion; including increase in productivity and quality, smallholders in international supply chains, access to finance
2. Working conditions; including living wage, gender and labour issues at both farm and processor level
3. Agrochemical use; including food safety, high residues, health and safety, and environmental issues
4. Climate change; including waste reduction, reduction of CO2 emissions, water use reduction and adaptation of production systems to climate change 

Together with our Fresh & Ingredients partners we will develop a common approach on existing but also new issues. With our targeted investments we co-fund projects on the ground. By sharing our learnings and creating shared solutions we can for instance improve impact on farmers livelihood. 

Over the last 5 years, IDH developed sector covenants and platforms with defined sustainable sourcing targets by 2020/2025. The covenants are based on individual company commitment, and each covenant includes a step-wise approach to source and import sustainable products over the coming years.

The Floriculture Sustainability Initiative (FSI) is a international public private sector initiative aiming to create mainstream sustainability in the floriculture sector by building on existing initiatives and activities.

The Sustainability Initiative Fruits and Vegetables (SIFAV) is a pan-European initiative with retailers, brands, traders and civil society organizations in seven European countries. SIFAV partners aim to make imports of fruits and vegetables from Africa, Asia and South America 100% sustainable in 2020.

Sustainable Nut Initiative (SNI) is a foundation open for all organizations working within the Nuts supply chain, with the objective to stimulate traceability and sustainability in the nut sector.

The Sustainable Spices Initiative (SSI) brings together leading multinational companies and NGOs with the aim of sustainably transforming the mainstream spices sector, thereby securing future sourcing and boosting economic growth in producing countries.

The Sustainability Initiative Fruits and Vegetables Processed (SIFAV-Processed) covenant has been formulated, and the first general assembly took place in November 2015. Seven companies have so far become signatories, while other ten companies have demonstrated interest to join.

The Sustainable Vanilla Initiative (SVI) aims to build a collaboration with local stakeholders, create and support ownership to maintain the quality of vanilla, increase livelihood of vanilla producers, support the professionalization of the sector and increase the supply of sustainably produced vanilla.

More on these initiatives can be found below. 

The proliferation of sustainability standards, codes, audit methodologies and different approaches generates confusion and inefficiency along supply chains. By promoting transparency and comparability among relevant standards, we support the alignment of existing efforts and promote an international reference for best practices in the areas of social and environmental sustainable supply chain management.

The International Trade Centre,  GLOBALG.A.P. and the Global Social Compliance Programme (GSCP) are our key partners in this respect.

With our platforms, covenants and partners we formulate a common definition and understanding of sustainability based on the benchmarking of relevant standards. By using a selection (basket) of responsible sourcing standards to ‘safely’ choose from, we encourage standards to align with international references, and we favour efficiencies in auditing and training. 

In order to be successful and effective we carefully monitor and evaluate our instruments and mechanisms. We monitor and measure volume of responsible products (against covenant commitments), and will create one method of monitoring leading to economies of scale for the industry.

The percentage of sustainable produced and traded products will be measured based on the quantity of kg/tonnage that complies with the defined sustainability criteria as agreed by the participating parties of the covenants. The participating private sector parties will annually report about their uptake of sustainable products to IDH.