Barry Callebaut sets sustainability targets beyond 2025

Barry Callebaut Group has presented a set of sharpened targets for Forever Chocolate, its plan to make sustainable chocolate the norm.

The 2030 targets were first launched in 2016 and now include new measurable targets for 2030 and beyond.

The plan focuses on four pillars, addressing the material challenges in the cocoa and chocolate supply chain.

1. Farmers

The company remains on track to lift more than 500,000 cocoa farmers out of poverty by 2025. With the main struggle of cocoa farmers being access to investments in their farms, Barry Callebaut has added that by 2023, it will have mobilised public and private stakeholders to collectively support and implement a transformative cocoa farming model generating living income.

It will also shift its focus from training farmers to providing input support, such as subsidised soil inputs and planting material, to financial support for third-party labour services and additional premiums.

2. Human rights

By 2025, the company’s entire supply chain will be covered by Human Rights Due Diligence, eliminating child labour. By 2030, all farming communities it sources from will be empowered to protect human rights.

This will require both private and public intervention to build the enabling infrastructure and establish Child Protection Committees at cocoa farmer community level.

3. Nature

The company will increase its focus on insetting CO₂ through agroforestry, moving away from offsetting. By 2030, the aim is to decarbonise its footprint in line with global efforts to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees. Barry Callebaut also maintains its target to be forest-positive by 2025 and aims to be a net zero company by 2050.

4. Sustainable ingredients and transparency

By 2030, Barry Callebaut plans to have 100% certified or verified cocoa and ingredients in all of its products, traceable to farm level. Over the last six years, the company has been working with suppliers and industry programs to define and implement sustainability standards for all of the ingredients it sources.

Key achievements to date are that one out of two of all the products sold contain 100% sustainable chocolate or cocoa.

Public intervention to drive structural change beyond Barry Callebaut’s direct supply chain is required for this to become a reality, alongside government policies to address the issue of traceability, rural infrastructure development and proper enforcement of national policies and legislation.

Barry Callebaut will continue to collaborate with Cocoa Horizons foundation for the implementation of its sustainability activities in its cocoa supply chain.

Image caption: Pruning by a team of farm workers, Cote d’Ivoire. Image credit: Nana Kofi Acquah ©Barry Callebaut.