Our sustainability strategy

Strong governance is essential to achieving our sustainability goals. This is why we set up six work streams.

• The sustainable supply chain work stream focuses on responsible purchasing

• The sustainable operations workflow consists of three subcategories: utilities, safety and the fight against waste.

• The sustainable products and packaging workflow explores how to make our products more nutritious and environmentally friendly, with consumer welfare at its core.

The work stream social responsibility focuses on the social part of sustainability: the well-being of our employees and local communities.

• The fifth workflow business ethics emphasizes ethics.

• The sixth work stream focuses on stakeholders & outreach and has a focus on our relationships with stakeholders and our communication externally.

A steering committee drives the sustainability program and aligns all work streams with the group’s strategy. The progress of work streams and the sustainability program is discussed during a monthly update. On a regular basis, progress is reported to the Sustainability Manager.

The ESG Ambassador team also plays a crucial role in our sustainability journey. Read more about this team in the “sustainability culture” section.

KPI-management

Based on the various work streams and input from the Sustainability Manager, we established the KPIs that we will measure and monitor, approved by the Sustainability Steering Committee and the Board of Directors.

We determined the strategic KPIs based on our focal points. In addition, we measure other KPIs set by Europe, specifically the CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive). This directive focuses on the disclosure of detailed sustainability information. The CSRD goes into effect in 2025 and will start working with the 2024 data. In this way, Europe aims to make sustainability reporting more consistent, as is already the case with financial information. The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) describe the requirements and KPIs (currently still partly in draft form).

We already included the ESRS requirements, and along with the KPIs, there are many indicators to consider. Managing and vetting that data in Excel would be difficult and lead to errors. Therefore, we chose a KPI management tool for sustainability that the entire group will use. The tool makes it easy to collect data from each division, entity and site in a consistent and centralized way.

The ability to link evidence to the data increases accuracy and auditability. Our local auditors enter the data into the system. Monitoring the KPIs, in turn, requires a multidisciplinary effort from all departments. Fortunately, the management system makes it easy for us and we can visually generate reports in different formats.

Greenhouse gas emissions

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges today. We too want to do our part to slow down global warming by reducing our carbon footprint. Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions were calculated according to the standard values of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG).

Scope 1 includes direct emissions from sources we own or operate, such as our fixed and mobile combustion plants, as well as process and fugitive emissions. Scope 2 includes indirect emissions released from the generation of purchased electricity. These are two emission groups that What’s Cooking? can directly affect.

Finally, there is Scope 3. This includes all emissions in our value chain for which we as an organization are indirectly responsible. Consider emissions from purchased goods and services, upstream and downstream transportation, corporate waste, employee commuting, business travel, the use and end-of-life of our products, ...

What’s Cooking? aims to reduce scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50% by the end of 2030 compared to 2021. Therefore, from 2023 we will use 50% green energy and from 2024 it will be 100%. A handful of energy effici- ency projects are already underway or planned for the coming years. The “Master Plan Cooling” will significantly reduce fugitive emissions as harmful refrigerants are replaced. From the end of 2023, about 30% of our company vehicle fleet will be electric, which means far fewer emissions.

We also recognize the importance of reducing scope 3 emissions, even though we have no direct influence on them. As with most companies, more than 90% (between 94 and 95% to be exact) of our total emissions are due to scope 3. Most of it comes from the products we buy (meat, ingredients and packaging), which account for 82% of our carbon footprint. In 2023, we are committed to an engagement program for our suppliers. With this, we encourage them to share information about their own footprint and then set reduction targets.

In addition to our company’s carbon footprint, we also began measuring the footprint of our products. Our finance and IT teams developed a tool to calculate this transparently and efficiently for all recipes. R&D and NPD take this into account when developing and improving recipes. This allows us to address emission reductions, product by product.