Touton group targets further sustainability gains with latest annual report

The French-based Touton cocoa and ingredients group has released its latest sustainability report, revealing its progress against key corporate social responsibility policy attainments within its core supply chains, writes Neill Barston.

According to the company’s latest CSR review, which has covered the period 2021-2022, the business has focused on three core pillars of offering sustainable products, working closely with its partners at origin sourcing nations, as well as ensuring the integrity of its operations against key challenges of communities impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and wider supply chain tests.

Among its key policy pledges, the company is a signatory of the 2017 Cocoa and Forests agreement for the Ivory Coast and Ghana, which bound the region’s governments to industry leaders in seeking to address deforestation levels and move towards greater traceability within the sector. This framework is set to be augmented by upcoming EU supply chain legislation bringing mandatory requirements for the sector’s sourcing policies.

The company has released its latest report amid a backdrop of wider concern within the sector, with a total of 1.5 million children within cocoa growing communities still exposed to child labour within Ghana and Ivory Coast, according to International Labour Organisation figures, and progress tackling deforestation believed to have been significantly negatively impacted within the two West African nations, which has been hit by ongoing issues of illegal gold mining, as well as unauthorised use of its forest areas.

As for its own operations, Touton has noted positive momentum with its own targets, and it has reportedly conducted a number of measures designed to improve its operations, including completing a full carbon footprint assessment to define its policy roadmap, which it has asserted is compatible with the 1.5 Paris climate agreement. This has been delivered through embedding mapping and agroforestry into all its supply chains. As Confectionery Production has previously reported, such techniques have been broadly viewed by industry observers as being critical to diversifying farming operations and preserving core forest areas.

Its additional activities have included exploring means of driving towards achieving higher incomes for farmers (moving towards living income standards), through setting up multi-commodity supply chains to facilitate income diversification, as well as collaborating with youth and startups to offer new economic and financial opportunities as well as professional farming services.

Further measures have included recording progression for sustainable volume sourcing, through enhanced collaboration with all supply chain actors and significant efforts to ensure products’ quality (ISO 9001, FSCC 22000). The business has also sought to nurture talent within its ranks through employee development and empowerment, as well as aiming to strengthen value chains through training and monitoring programmes, including ethics and responsible practices policies.

The company, which presently employs around 700 people, now has a total of 14 subsidiary offices around the world, and has reportedly achieved a total of 90% of its directly sourced cocoa procured sustainably, including using its own cocoa processing facility. According to its latest figures, the business processed around 340,000 tonnes of cocoa in the past year, with its other operations centred on the coffee and wider ingredients market, including producing vanilla.

Joseph Larrose, Deputy Managing Director, commented: “To keep building the sustainable trust relationship with producers and clients, our CSR approach continues to focus on people. From producers to employees, we are nurturing and building on their expertise to champion exemplary business practices. We are strengthening our data systems and innovative sustainability programmes to better deliver on our Human Rights and United Nations engagements, as well as our due diligence expectations.”

Sharing his assessment of the report, Patrick de Boussac, CEO of the Touton Group, believed that the business had successfully faced-up to some challenges impacting on the global market. He commented: “Managing risks is what we do, day in and day out. This year again, flexibility was of the essence. We dealt with the pandemic, freight, and geopolitical crisis. We also accelerated our investments within producing countries and into the sustainable and digital management of our supply chains. In the face of constant uncertainty, we must go beyond being simply good traders of cocoa, coffee, vanilla, and ingredients.

He added in his foreword to the report: “In a rapidly changing environment, we need to work together more than ever to find solutions that make commodity value chains more sustainable. We need solutions that strike the right balance between offering value for all parties in the supply chain – from farm to fork – while maintaining our competitiveness. We will continue to participate actively in the sustainability efforts of the cocoa, coffee, and ingredients sector platforms. Together, we will engage in discussions taking place in the European Union and in France, where we have joined the French Initiative for Sustainable Cocoa,” adding that with an entrepreneurial spirit, the business would show its determination to succeed in adapting to conditions within the market, through enhanced collaborative working practices.