Growing interest in the origins of food, its production methods, safety and healthiness, are increasing demands for transparency in the food industry. The food sector is also becoming subject to even more stringent regulation, which requires companies, for example, to adopt ever newer monitoring and reporting systems. A particular challenge to corporate business in recent times has been unexpected and rapid changes in the geopolitical climate and the global economy.

At Paulig, we participate actively in the topical debate on the food sector, bringing to it our personal views and our expertise in the coffee business. Issues of responsibility are strongly to the fore in the European Union. The EU Commission is currently examining, for example, the constitution and impacts of the carbon footprint (Product Environmental Footprint, PEF) in 25 different product categories, one of which is coffee.

Amidst changes and growing demands, only a company which has genuinely internalised responsible procedures in its everyday actions can thrive. When things are essentially on track, it is easier to respond to new requirements. We consider the progress of our responsibility work through five areas of emphasis, embracing the voyage of coffee from the far ends of the earth, all the way from bean to cup. We have devoted effort in particular to responsible procurement, the personnel's wellbeing, and environmental matters. We report on progress in the news on this website and in a yearly report.

An important tool in our responsibility is the Sustainable Coffee programme, which extends to 2018, with which we are promoting the responsibility of the raw materials and packagings used for our products. The aim is, by the end of 2018, to verify responsibility of all our green coffee by a third party. For packaging, we achieved an important stage in 2014 with the launch of the first aluminium-free laminate packages. The upgrading work continues and will require substantial investments during the years ahead in new packaging machinery for all our production plants. As the packaging machines and packagings are modernised, we will also anticipate future demands for packages, so that the new hardware will serve flexibly and for as long as possible.

The personnel's wellbeing has always been important to our company. I am happy that, as the corporation grows and among the turmoil of change, the personnel see Paulig as an even better workplace than before. The top-notch results of our TellUs personnel survey last year show that our unremitting deployments in improving things like supervisor work and communications have borne fruit. All the benchmarks in the results were above the European averages.

Coffee is a valuable natural product, the availability of which is not self-evident. The future cultivation of coffee is threatened by many factors, the most concrete of which has been seen in recent years as climate change. If there is to be enough coffee in times to come, we have to take action now. It is also important for us to know where the coffee we buy comes from and to know our own coffee suppliers. This is why we visit plantations as much as possible. Since 2001 we have played an active role in the International Coffee Partners (ICP) community, which supports coffee-growers with multi-year development projects. These have been participated in by more than 30,000 farmers in 12 countries. The same community has also established the Coffee & Climate project to support farmers' adaptation to climate change.

We want to secure the future for good coffee by raising the bar for our responsibility work, one step at a time. The Sustainable Coffee programme is a good start for this.
 

Elisa Markula
Senior Vice President
Coffee Division, Paulig Group