‘Collaborate on supply chains, compete at the shelf’: chocolate boss urges firms to ‘break the mindset’ of supply-chain competition
Vodafone sustainability manager also highlights risk of ‘over-collaboration’
The CEO of chocolate maker Tony’s Chocolonely has called on companies in all industries to collaborate more closely on making their supply chains sustainable.
Speaking during a panel about responsible business on Tuesday, Douglas Lamont said “one of the biggest challenges is how you break the mindset in most industries that everybody competes end-to-end on everything, so the supply chain is a place of competition too”.
“I’m a great believer that we should all be collaborating a lot more in the supply chain and competing at shelf,” he continued.
Tony’s Chocalonely has a sibling business called Tony’s Open Chain, which sells ethically-sourced cocoa beans to other chocolate companies.
“We have a number of competitors that source their beans from us, because we know the only way to drive change across the whole industry is to scale,” said Lamont.
“My choice there, in terms of trade-offs, is that the chocolate business will grow slightly more slowly, but… the ethical sourcing of beans will grow a lot faster, and this time next year we will be sourcing more beans for other people than we will be for ourselves.”
Speaking on the same panel at this year’s Reuters Responsible Business Europe conference, Peter Jelkeby, the CEO and Chief Sustainability Officer of IKEA’s UK and Ireland arm said “the beauty” of making improvements in the supply chain is that it is a cross-sector activity.
During another discussion, George Barrett, a sustainability manager for telecom giant Vodafone said he expected collaboration between peers to accelerate Scope 3 emissions reductions to mature over coming years.
“It’s a bit nascent, and everyone’s a bit unclear, but I think we’ll get there,” he said.
However, he warned, “at the minute, there is a risk that we almost ‘over-collaborate’”.
“There’s not much formalisation… and therefore the risk is that you can spend your week collaborating in industry calls. So we’re trying to be really selective about how and when we collaborate, to ensure… the rest of the sector is having an equal output or benefit from our collective engagement.”
Barrett pointed to a recent case in which Vodafone and its peers engaged with a common supplier, which he did not name, to encourage it to introduce a life cycle assessment for a key product. This will help all the telecom companies have access to additional data to support their Scope 3 roadmaps, he explained.