🌱 Slavery Free Supply Chains: UP-UP Chocolate are raising the bar, and introducing the Foodies Fighting Slavery SME Toolkit!

Featuring TRIBE Freedom Foundation, UP-UP Chocolate, Honestly Tasty and more...

Jun 05, 2023

Happy Monday!

This week we cover:

Quick Take: Introducing the newly launched Foodies Fighting Slavery: SME Toolkit!
Brand Spotlight: UP-UP Chocolate are raising the bar via their 100% slavery free supply chain.
In case you missed it: Bread & Jam’s Future Summit 2023: Top Takeaways From FMCG's Leading Brands. Lessons from Tony Chocolonely, ODDBOX, Belazu, Pip & Nut and more...

> Good News Last Week

🎯 Honestly Tasty announced that they are going nut free, making their cheese 77.7% less carbon emission compared to dairy cheese. They are partnering with My Emissions to better understand their carbon hotspots.

🎯 Wyke Farms announced that its Ivy’s Reserve, Salted Farmhouse Butter, is now available with carbon-neutral credentials. They are partnering with The Carbon Trust to undertake a “cradle-to-grave” footprint analysis.

🎯 Milk & More announced that their customers in South London will be able to buy one-litre bottles of Coke Zero in a bottle that they can rinse and leave on their doorstep after consumption. They have already offered reusable glass bottles for several of its own-brand lines including milk, water, fruit juices and soft drinks.

⭐️ Olio launched its partnership with Whole Foods Market, to share their surplus organic produce with communities around their 7 London stores. They have rescued nearly 3,000 meals from Whole Foods so far.

⭐️ Mars Incorporated launched its recyclable paper packaging trial across its Mars chocolate bars, rolling out their product in Tesco stores starting this week, to offer more environmentally friendly packaging.

⭐️ Aldi announced its partnership with Polytag, a tech company that helps to tag and trace packaging. This will help them provide insights on the quantity of its packaging that is actually recycled and to track an item’s journey through the recycling process.

⭐️ Sainsbury’s becomes the first of the big four supermarkets in the UK to commit to selling 100% Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)-certified pole, and line-caught, canned tuna cross its own label offering.

⚡ The Carbon Literacy Project launched a Carbon Literacy Training course for Breweries, to help breweries understand more about climate change and what to do to fight carbon emissions. It is a first step towards an internationally recognised certificate from The Carbon Literacy Project.

⚡ Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with the Sustainable Food Trust, launched the Big Food Redesign Challenge that aims to catalyse and inspire the food industry to regenerate nature using circular design approaches to food.

> Click on each link to read more.

> Quick Take

Introducing the newly launched Foodies Fighting Slavery: SME Toolkit!

Modern slavery, unfortunately, still exists today and is the exploitation of people for personal or commercial gain. While there are various types of modern slavery, forced labour is the most common form within the food and drink industry. Forced labour is any work or service that people are forced to do against their will, usually under the threat of punishment. To put a figure on the problem, there are over 27 million victims trapped in forced labour globally.

*Source: Foodies Fighting Slavery: SME Toolkit*

For SMEs looking to tackle modern slavery in their supply chains, TRIBE Freedom Foundation, in collaboration with Stronger Together, Stop the Traffik and the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, have released their Foodies Fighting Slavery: SME Toolkit, focusing on forced labour.

TRIBE Freedom Foundation is a community driven charity on a mission to end modern slavery and empower the survivors. Through their partners at TRIBE Nutrition they have a unique insight into the challenges and opportunities for UK Food and Drink SMEs. Their toolkit, containing simple, practical and actionable steps, helps food and drink SMEs to eradicate modern slavery in their operations and supply chains.

What can SMEs do to combat this?

TRIBE recognised that, despite huge intent to do the right thing, tackling slavery as an SME can be challenging. Unlike large companies they cannot rely on their sustainability teams in the same way but neither do they want to purchase ingredients made from forced labour. This is where the Toolkit comes in.

The Toolkit is split into 4 coherent steps:

Commit: Understand the problem and commit to taking action.
Assess: Start mapping operations and supply chains to help prioritise risk.
Act: Take action to respond to the risks identified.

Only once the above steps are completed can the fourth step be explored:

Longer Term Actions: Embed a process of continuous improvement and strengthen your systems over time.

As indicated by the graphic below, action against modern slavery is a continuous cycle and TRIBE suggests revisiting steps 1-3 on a regular basis.

What resources are available in the toolkit?

The toolkit provides actions and tools to facilitate each of the steps. They even have the amount of time required to prep and deliver each activity and use each tool - handy!

Activities include:

Workshop resources (videos and slides) with plans on how to execute.
Meeting formats with ideas on who to invite.
Tips for organisational buy-in.
Checklists to guide you through each step.
Templates for a modern slavery policy.

Tools include:

Guides to map out your operations and wider supply chain.
Risk assessments to fill in.
Formats with examples of codes of conducts.
Supplier questionnaires.

Alongside all the practical resources, the toolkit is also bursting with case studies to bring to life examples of best practice from various organisations.

Want to dive into more detail?

Find the link to the Foodies Fighting Slavery: SME Toolkit here.
Learn more about the actions, tools and resources here.
Contact the Foodies Fighting Slavery Team with any questions here.

> Brand Spotlight

UP-UP Chocolate are raising the bar via their 100% slavery free supply chain.

Slavery free chocolate brands are on the rise - and rightly so. At the Bread & Jam Future Summit last week, we heard from Ben Greensmith of Tony’s Chocolonely and left inspired by brands making it their mission to make chocolate slavery free. Ben shared that two thirds of the world’s cocoa comes from Ghana and the Ivory Coast, with 1.6 million children working on cocoa farms. The majority of this cocoa is sold to household names in the industry.

According to a 2016 report by Fortune Magazine:

"For a decade and a half, the big chocolate makers have promised to end child labor in their industry ... [Yet] 2.1 million West African children still do the dangerous and physically taxing work of harvesting cocoa."

Enter UP-UP Chocolate - the first brand in the world to make their chocolate slavery free, certified by independent organisation Slave Free Trade. SharingChallenging Tony’s mission, they’ve streamlined their supply chain to produce chocolate that is fully traceable and 100% slave free.

A purposefully short supply chain

UP-UP source their cocoa from a single estate, called El Rosario on the Caribbean coast in the North of Colombia, with a purposefully short supply chain. The shorter the supply chain the more control and transparency they have to ensure that their product is slave free.

They trace not just the commodity, but the people. With 200 people on the single-estate plantation, 2000 in the processing site and 20 in their factory, this is a world’s first from the chocolate industry. They’ve begun with cocoa, but next up will be sugar and milk.

The 200 people that UP-UP employ on their plantation are also not just shareholders but employees with contracts, holiday pay, set minimum wages and a legal framework within which they work.

*slavefreetrade’s ‘10 principles for decent work’. Source: slavefreechocolate.org*

‘10 Principles for Decent Work’, not Fairtrade

In critique of Fairtrade, UP-UP have chosen to follow slavefreetrade’s Ten Principles for Decent Work. But what’s the difference?

Labels such as Fairtrade and the Rainforest Alliance Connection can't guarantee that the chocolate was made without exploitative labour. These certifications are unable to address one of the largest issues in the chocolate supply chain.

The 10 principles define ‘decent work’ in line with international human rights law and determine how standards are being met. With poverty at the root cause of the issue, these principles target this.

Same mission, different approaches: Tony’s and UP-UP

Whilst UP-UP have made a 100% slave free supply chain, Tony’s have taken a different approach. To prove the scalability of slave-free chocolate, Tony’s tackle change from within the industry working alongside big chocolate producers. Although they cannot claim to be 100% slave free, they have set their sights on changing the entire industry, with an open supply chain they encourage others to follow.

Both approaches identify a shift towards making slavery free chocolate both a proven possibility and the norm. With more brands and more demand, slavery free chocolate can begin its necessary rise.

Take a closer look at UP-UP Chocolate:

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