Corporate Responsibility Expectations for Kraft Foods and Our Suppliers
Each Kraft Foods employee must follow 10 key rules in our code of conduct. Common to all of these rules is the imperative to “inspire trust” in all that we do. Underpinning our code is a comprehensive compliance and integrity program designed to ensure that we run our business consistent with our values and applicable legal standards.
We also work with thousands of suppliers, consultants and business partners around the world. Ideally, we and they will have comparably high standards of conduct. Of course, we cannot — and do not presume to — control how they run their businesses. But we certainly take pragmatic steps to align what they do for us with our own standards of fair and honest dealings.
- Supplier Selection and Risk Analysis.
We begin with the selection process. As we evaluate suppliers, we want to be familiar with their own codes of conduct and reputations, as well as their ability to deliver quality, service, and total value to Kraft Foods.
- Corporate Responsibility in Supplier Contracts.
Once we determine a good fit with a supplier or business partner, we develop a contract that not only provides the core commercial terms but specifically incorporates our corporate responsibility expectations. For example, we would include legally enforceable provisions on child labor and worker safety. Over the next several years, we will work toward having these corporate responsibility expectations in all contracts with suppliers and business partners.
- Assessing Corporate Responsibility through PROGRESS.
We are hardly alone in our approach as most major companies have supplier corporate responsibility requirements. Yet most companies are both suppliers and customers, leading to a proliferation of codes of conduct and assessment requests. We helped create a far simpler and better approach for society called PROGRESS. This industry initiative allows a supplier to provide common information to its customers so each customer can independently reach business decisions in accordance with its own corporate responsibility standards.
We are currently rolling out PROGRESS to our suppliers and business partners. This is an ambitious global effort that will take several years to complete. When dealing with such an important issue as corporate responsibility, we have taken a long-term approach that we are confident puts us on the right path.