Nine things of note in Strauss Group's ninth report

The Sustainability Reporting journey is always so fascinating. The companies that I love to work with treat Sustainability Reporting as an opportunity for deep reflection, discussion, debate, consideration, revision, re-framing and renewal. While these processes often happen throughout the year, the choice to publish a Sustainability Report by a certain date ensures that these process streams are priority-funneled into one orderly alignment of content that becomes the company's account of its impacts and its unique sustainability story.

Strauss Group has been doing this now for the past nine years, and while you might think that it's easy to simply pick up with each new report where the last one left off, this is never the case. Our world is so dynamic, our days are so crammed with everything and great companies do so much in one year, that each new Sustainability Report is a new challenge and a new opportunity. Hence the reflection, debate and renewal. And this this case, Strauss Group's ninth Sustainability Report is a unique story, a creative presentation and a compelling read.  

1. Listening, Acting, Improving
This year, the focus for Strauss was Listening, Acting, Improving. It was driven by deep introspection throughout the year, and consultation with stakeholders, especially consumers, who provided important and insightful feedback to Strauss Group about things that go right to the core of the business and the way the business is conducted. Osnat Golan, VP for Communications, Digital and Sustainability at Strauss Group made the point: "During the past two years, we have learned that the highest priorities for our consumers are fair pricing and helping to curb the rising cost of living, as well as advancing healthy nutrition through our products." This year, Strauss Group's report reflects the actions the Group has taken in direct response to stakeholder concerns and expectations.

2. Fair product pricing
There are few, if any, food companies that address pricing policy in their Sustainability Reports. What is the responsibility of a food company to price food products so that a broader spectrum of the population can afford to buy them? How many companies acknowledge this as a responsibility? I suspect that Strauss Group is pioneering in its approach to respond to the rising costs of living and the affordability of basic foodstuffs by reducing consumer list prices across a range of products in the order of between 2.5% and 22.8% in its home market in Israel in 2015. In a year when consumers were continuing to assertively state that food pricing has put certain products beyond their reach, Strauss became the first company (and the only one to date) in the local market to listen, act and improve. These price reductions are significant. After all, corporate responsibility and sustainability is not just about saving the planet. It's also about contributing to the quality of life on the planet. Fair pricing is a highly sensitive, subjective and complex issue - it takes a bold company to accept "fair pricing" as an objective and take measures to implement a fair price policy for consumers.

3. Supporting employees
The second initiative that ran alongside support for consumers in 2015 was support for employees. Employees are consumers too, and if the cost of living rises, they feel the pinch just as other consumers do. Many companies today accept the concept of "living wage" and implement policies to compensate employees in line with a target wage level. At Strauss in Israel, following the direct input of hundreds of employees in feedback meetings over the past two years, Strauss understood the need to protect lower income employees and took this seriously as an element of the company's approach to corporate responsibility and its social license to operate. In the past two years, Strauss boosted benefits for employees at the lower end of the income scale and in 2015, set the way for several very significant additions, including a fixed proprietary minimum wage around 7% higher that the legally mandated level, child care support worth thousands of dollars per year for eligible employees and the opportunity to contribute to an employer-matched tax-free savings fund that helps employees protect their future with an accessible savings program. In addition, employees receive a host of other benefits to help them cope with the economic challenges of simply making it through the month in the black.

4. The Kitchen
The progress made at The Kitchen is worthy of note in Strauss Group's ninth report. The Kitchen is a pioneering initiative by Strauss with the support of the Chief Scientist of Israel, designed to advance food-tech in Israel to deliver new technologies that improve the sustainability of food production or deliver new benefits for consumers. This is a contribution to the advancement of the food industry - the technologies that are developed will not necessarily used by Strauss Group in their operations. With an investment of $25 million over 8 years (40% funded by Strauss, the remainder by the Israeli government), in its first year of activity, the Kitchen has already propelled three amazingly innovative food-tech startups into a new sphere of development and commercial activity. Entrepreneurs would have a hard time accelerating their development without such support. Enabling them to get on the map is a significantly positive sustainability impact.

 

5. The performance

In one year, since the last report, Strauss Group has made significant progress on several fronts, and the performance highlights are delivered up front for readers who want an overview and not an extensive read. One summary infographic for each main section of the report does a good job in pointing readers in the direction of what's most significant.

6. The design elements

Of course, Sustainability Reports are about content, not design. But design that brings reports to life makes it fun for us to read the content. It demonstrates an intent to produce a document that will encourage readership, rather than a stuffy old PDF crammed with text that turns you off before you get to page 2. In 2015, the folks at Strauss Group's long-standing report designer, Studio Merhav, have excelled themselves in creative design that supports the narrative and makes this report a delight to read. Infographics blended with photos and freehand design cause you to stop and look at the imagery as you read the report, giving you time to consider the meaning and the messages that they reflect. A world away from the Stock era and hand-cupped globes of the early days of reporting. Here are a few examples. Aren't they fabulous? 

 

7. Environmental data presentation

Another design feature in this ninth report is the presentation of environmental data. Instead of the usual graphs and charts, environmental data is presented in a way which makes it fun to actually look at the numbers. This presentation supplements the detailed performance tables over several years that are included in the report for those who want the specific numbers. But for most of us who want to see the big picture quickly, this presentation does the job. 

8. The credits

Not many companies include credits to those who work on the report. Strauss Group has always done that. Credits to providers who have worked on the report is an expression of the respect Strauss has for other businesses, small businesses, as it happens, and demonstrates another aspect of both transparency and social responsibility. (At this point, it's appropriate to disclose that I worked on this report, together with my team at Beyond Business - the fourth report we have supported for Strauss Group alongside additional consulting work on different aspects of strategy development. It is always a pleasure and an honor to work with Strauss.)

9. Daniela

The achievements of Sustainability Reporting Managers often go unsung in our reporting world. A few present at conferences, a few write blogs, but most of the hard work in reporting is driven by passionate, skilled and impressively dedicated individuals who mobilize entire organizations in order to get a result their companies can be proud of - most of whom we never get to know. The achievements of Reporting Managers are no small thing, and real credit is due to them. So it is with Daniela Prusky-Sion, Strauss Group's Sustainability and Internal Comms Director, who has led this work for several years. Daniela is a dynamo, never tiring in her efforts to do things better, do things right and do more things to advance Strauss Group's strategic approach to sustainability and improved contribution. Reports under her watch get better and better.

As usual, take a look! Give feedback!

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Need help writing your first / next Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz 

How will you simplify your supply chain this year?

Here's a little one-question one-answer quiz.

Question: 

What's the second best thing you can do to mitigate supply chain risk in 2016? 

Answer: (please select one)

a) Attend the Sedex 2016 conference

b) Attend the Sedex 2016 conference

c) Attend the Sedex 2016 conference

d) Attend the Sedex 2016 conference

Whether you selected answer a) b) c) or d), read on. Learn more about why the Sedex Conference in March in London in 2016 should be part of your schedule.  

I grew up in the supply chain. In my formative years as a young manager with Procter and Gamble, I was responsible for logistics in Scotland and Northern Ireland in my very first management role, and then, over eight years until I decided to move on to pastures new, I took on successively diverse and challenging roles across different aspects of the supply chain in Europe including purchasing, customer service, distribution center management and more. And today, working with clients on strategy and reporting, I always feel at home discussing the opportunities (and risks) relating to ethical and sustainable supply. In that context, Sedex often crops up as one of the most influential players in the field of sustainable sourcing and responsible supply chain practice. I am looking forward to attending the 2016 conference, not only because I'll have the chance to speak (you all know how I love to talk), but mainly because I have the feeling that I am going to learn 

a lot.

Sedex is a not for profit membership organisation dedicated to driving improvements in ethical and responsible business practices in global supply chains. As the largest collaborative platform for sharing ethical supply chain data, Sedex is an innovative and effective supply chain management solution, helping companies to reduce risk, protect their reputation and improve supply chain practices. 

I could write reams about the vital importance of ethical supply chain management and the increasing risk as businesses become more global in scope and more complex in scale. It's also a gobbler-upper of resources. Monitoring, audits, training, communications, evaluations, assessments in a context of increasingly strict regulatory requirements means that both customers and suppliers must invest significant resources to stay not only cost-effective but also low-risk. At the same time, the supply chain, if you treat it right, can be a fabulous source of innovation and creativity, enabling business expansion and growth. And of course, no Sustainability Report is complete without critical supply chain disclosures. It seems that Sedex is in the right place at the right time. And by attending the Sedex 2016 Conference (#Sedex16), you will be too! Check out the agenda here.  

I posed a few questions to the Sedex CEO, Jonathan Ivelaw-Chapman, about supply chain sustainability and the conference. Check out his insights: 

What's the most important aspect of your role at Sedex? What's most challenging and what's most satisfying? 

Jonathan: Since joining Sedex, what has struck me is our people and the passion they bring to the organisation. For me, it’s our values and our people that are the most important aspect at Sedex. The most satisfying part of what I am doing is seeing our employees engage in future-thinking in fresh and innovative ways. They are all here because they care and are passionate, and the talent and energy we have seems endless. This is wonderful to observe and participate in. 

Coming from the technology industry, where for nearly 30 years, hype, language and behaviors were all about self-justification and increased investment, I now sense an exit to the “hype” that we have all experienced. I want to help avoid any similarities to the IT industry, by bringing clarity and affordability into the sustainability industry. The challenge for Sedex is to help our industry and membership navigate in an increasingly complex sustainability world. We will do this by simplifying our language, facilitating opportunities to work collaboratively, and giving our members an industry roadmap, with a vision of the way responsible sourcing can work. 

The Sedex Conference 2016 theme runs under the banner of simplification. Everyone seems to talk about the sustainability landscape becoming increasingly complex! How realistic is simplification?

Jonathan: The business and sustainability landscape is rapidly changing. From natural resource scarcity to human rights, child labour to an evolving regulatory landscape, our industry is facing a range of challenges. With all these new topics coming up, sustainability is becoming a complicated space with new initiatives, frameworks, certifications, and schemes, creating silos in industries, countries, topic areas themselves.

Sedex is already looking at simplifying supply chains and recognising the interconnectivities between different issues such as bribery and health and safety and whether there could be more effective ways for companies and their suppliers to manage these issues as one as opposed to treating them in silos. 

There is no need to re-invent the wheel but rather try to scale up – pick what’s relevant to you and collaborate with other stakeholders. We might not have all the right answers just yet, but we are getting there. The conference will provide a great forum to discuss and address the challenges and hear from the industry leaders on how they are going about simplifying the challenging issues and approach to tackling them. 

What's going to be different about the SEDEX Conference 2016? What highlights should we look out for? 

Jonathan: This will be our largest conference so far, bringing together around 1,000 leaders in responsible sourcing for two days of discussions. The conference will be live-streamed and for the first time, we will also have live interviews with conference speakers straight from the conference hall. The conference agenda will cover the most relevant topics for supply chain sustainability – from modern slavery legislation, how organisations can quantify, value, and improve their impact on society, to best practice in agricultural sustainability measurement and reporting tools and resources and much more. 

We have an exciting line up of speakers – from multinational companies such as Kellogg and Mars, to organisations such as International Trade Centre and Thomson Reuters across plenary sessions, master-classes, workshops and spotlight talks. 

For the first time ever we will also host the VIP Networking Dinner event at the Barbican’s tropical plant conservatory in the heart of the City of London. Our conference delegates often ask for more opportunities to network and this dinner, designed for just 150 guests, will provide an exclusive opportunity to connect with industry experts and discuss hot sustainability topics. We are delighted to have John Morrison, Executive Director of the Institute for Human Rights and Business, speaking during the dinner. As a well-known and influential voice on business and human rights, and a highly engaging and knowledgeable speaker, John's speech will be a real highlight of the evening.

***********

And now another little one-question one-answer quiz:

Question: 

What's the first best thing you can do to mitigate supply chain risk in 2016? 

Answer: (please select one)

a) Attend the Sedex 2016 conference

b) Attend the Sedex 2016 conference

c) Attend the Sedex 2016 conference

d) Attend the Sedex 2016 conference 

Look forward to seeing you there!
Drop me a note if you'd like a 50% discount on the standard ticket price on registration. Who wouldn't?



elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Need help writing your first / next Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz  

Will GRI's new strategy work?

GRI has taken on a big role: "Empowering Sustainable Decisions." The new tagline of GRI's 2015-2020 strategy is rather broad brush. GRI is aiming to reach beyond the way organizations collate and report sustainability information to the place where the market actually thinks about what to do with the information that's ordered into neat performance indicators and creatively designed into sustainability reports. At first glance, this is a bit of a wishy-washy strategy, far less concrete and quantitative than we might have expected GRI to deliver, especially since other organizations in this space are driving forward in very measurable ways, pushing the uptake of reporting and disclosure in different forms, whether it be emissions, water or supply chain (CDP), 10-K or 20-F disclosures (SASB) or value creation (IIRC) and more. GRI, who has always been about driving the uptake of reporting, is now re-purposing itself to drive the uptake of using reporting. 

What pushed GRI in this direction? Clearly it has something to do with GRI's new leadership. Michael Meehan, who is just a couple of months short of completing one year at the helm of GRI. In my conversation with Michael earlier this week, he told me: " I come from the technology space. When I came to this market, some things were glaringly obvious. One was the lack of collaboration. In fact, there was more of an adversarial approach. Many organizations working in the same space but not getting along. It's understandable up to a point, there's competition for funding, resources, attention.  But this was not serving the market best. The corporate world and the policy world needs us to get along. There is going to continue to be fragmentation down the road, we are not going to stop seeing new frameworks, new approaches, new ways of working. What we have to do is change our frame of reference to help organizations and markets move forward more effectively in this context."

The new strategy has four pillars:

Enabling smart policy: More advocacy work and collaborative work with policy-makers, policy influencers and organizations around the world to embed sustainability-based factors into how things get decided and done.

More reporters, better reporting: The communicated elevation of GRI to "standard setter" and its continued uptake among the potential reporting community.

Moving beyond reports: New ways of using the report output as input, with a little help from technology, Big Data, integrated and accessible information flows.
Innovation and collaboration: Driving greater innovation in the area of sustainability disclosure and use of sustainability information.

These pillars build on the heritage of GRI as "the pioneer of the sustainability reporting process" and express an expansion of the scope of the role that GRI sees itself playing moving forward. But actually, it's more than expansion. It's more than "more of the same but different". It's different. It's a rebirth and it's as risky as it is bold. In essence, in plain language, I believe the GRI might be saying something like this: Hey folks, despite the fact that almost all we have ever talked about is reporting, we have now seen the light. Reporting is not the end-game. What you do with reporting outputs is the end-game. Now we have realized this, we are going to transform what people do with reporting outputs. This is an end to the era of asking who reads reports. This is a new era where we ask how can we use the reporting process and disclosures to make better decisions. We can help transform public policy, markets, and the way everyone makes decisions. Come with us. Use us. Work with us."

This is a paradigm shift and it's actually quite clever. Other organizations have not really claimed this empowering space. Other organizations have, like GRI, been providing tools, helping to get disclosures out there, relying on the inevitability of transparency as a catalyst for change, which it is. And it works, up to a point. Many times, just by asking the questions and analyzing the data for sustainability reports, companies start to change. But at the same time, catalysts need reagents (I did an Open University course once in basic chemistry, believe it or not.) GRI's new strategic focus adds the reagent. No-one else is doing this systematically, as far as I am aware.  I believe GRI's new strategy may just be one of those things that you hear and say, hmm, that's so obvious. But for GRI, it's quite a shift. 

In recent years, GRI has been outpaced by a dynamic market that pulled companies in many, often conflicting directions in terms of sustainability disclosure. The fragmentation of the market has intensified, and according to Michael Meehan , it's not going to stop. Rather than try to dominate the reporting space, GRI now wants to harness and grow the energies in that space to deliver better outcomes. GRI calls this Empowering Sustainable Decisions. 

But, to empower implies full trust in GRI as a leader in understanding how we can not only measure, quantify and report sustainability impacts but also improve them by integrating sustainability into all processes. Empowering sustainable decisions implies that ultimately, it's the GRI reporting process and framework that is key to all that we might be able to decide in our sustainable world. The trick is what you do with it after you reported it. But where does GRI get it's legitimacy to claim this empowerment platform? 

GRI sees itself as a launch pad for innovation, but so far, innovation has not been immediately recognizable as GRI DNA. In many cases, GRI has been left out of the running in the most innovative approaches in sustainability accounting today. The Integrated Reporting movement has entirely side-stepped GRI and new, sexy integrated reports are as far from GRI as they are from actually being integrated. The entire sector discussion has whooshed over the head of GRI. SASB has cornered that space, and the smart selection of Michael Bloomberg as the SASB Chair has brought SASB the very first practical application of a SASB standard in Bloomberg's  2014 Impact Report. The whole natural capital accounting world has moved beyond the GRI frame of reference and WRI/WBCSD/CDP have driven new sustainability approaches in several sectors. Becoming a launch-pad for innovation in sustainability decision making is therefore no small ask. And as for collaboration, it takes more than a strategy to make this work. It takes others who want to collaborate. Michael Meehan already hinted that the affinity for collaboration in this space so far is not terribly exciting and creating any sort of common ground will continue to be an uphill battle. And as for better reporting, well, don't get me started, as Billy Crystal said about 3,000 times in  Mr. Saturday Night. The diplomatic way of referring to better reporting is that there is an ocean of opportunity to improve the quality of disclosures and of reporting. GRI has skillfully avoided doing anything tangible to improve the quality of reporting, focusing only on the quality of reporting frameworks and the quality of reporters through GRI training. In terms of influencing policy, although some successes have been chalked up, GRI does not figure as the framework of choice in some of the leading policy declarations we have seen in the past few years, such as the European Directive on Non-Financial Disclosure.  

The new strategy, empowering everything, is therefore going to be a real stretch. But it's the right stretch. And let's face it, GRI has a few credits in the bank to give us hope, if not yet total confidence, that GRI can pull this off. After all, GRI has led the sustainability reporting movement, there can be no doubt about that. Even if the European Directive is a little vague, as was Paragraph 47 at Rio+20 before it, there can be no doubt that GRI has steered the agenda and positively influenced outcomes that achieved something if not everything. With G4, GRI placed material impacts in high-res, and that catapulted materiality to center-stage of the discourse, well beyond the leverage that had been achieved by AccountAbility some years earlier. Even if companies are still not quite comfortable with focus - relevant transparency as I call it - we can see an emerging shift toward material disclosures in favor of any and every and all disclosures. GRI has maintained the multi-stakeholder aspect of its approach for broad legitimacy, which, despite some wobbles, remains an achievement in this space, unlike, for example, the IIRC that is dominated by investment portfolios. As Michal Meehan told me: "The multi-stakeholder approach is so valuable. It ensures you have a very considered approach to what information is relevant and necessary. It leads to users believing that the data selection is trustworthy. It means that users of reported information can trust the process that defined how the data is created. We need to make sure everyone has a voice."

On balance, then, we can afford to give GRI a couple of years to see if the new focus is starting to shape up. Some elements are in place - a very strong advocacy team, an expansive network and increasing uptake of G4. Also, we all recognize a sense of underlying frustration that is sometimes expressed around the fact that, if reporting is actually mainstream, why have we not fixed the world? Perhaps GRI and the empowering piece is what's going to make the difference. I asked Michal Meehan how he expects to measure success. What will be different in 2020 when we have the "how did we do" conversation? Michael said: "I have  a whole load of KPIs that we could put in place - but to be honest, I want to shoot for a world where you don't have sustainability professionals and other leaders in organizations sitting in silos. I am hoping to see companies integrating sustainability into all business decisions. When GRI first started up, we had to convince everyone that sustainability is important. Now, people get it. What they need is better tools to integrate sustainability into the way they make decisions."

A word of caution, however, before we get too euphoric. Let's not get so caught up being empowering that we lose sight of where we came from: the need for organizations to account for their impacts on the lives of all stakeholders (and not just their bank accounts), as the key to creating positive and sustainable change in the world on the planet. Let's not get so empowered that we forget that, at the core, we have still got to grind through the task of delivering sustainability disclosures and/or reports that are robust, relevant and balanced. 

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Need help writing YOUR Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz   

G4 goes MAD with Netafim

Why do we love our work? Because we get to help companies like Netafim tell their story. In this case, we all went a little MAD. That's not MAD like crazy cuckoo but MAD like Mass Adoption of Drip Irrigation. The more you know about drip, the more MAD you become. It's compelling, it's an imperative, it's the present and it's the future. Drip irrigation is about sustainable agriculture, efficient use of resources, water conservation, improved yields and quality of food crops and improved livelihoods for millions of large growers and smallholder farmers around the world. Drip irrigation is synonymous with Netafim Ltd, a group of thousands of dedicated, passionate individuals who come together with a collective mission to make the entire world MAD. (Nothing new here - Netafim has been the leading world pioneer of drip irrigation since 1965, check out Netafim's legacy website).

We love Netafim and we love MAD. And this is the report that we helped create for Netafim, describing the sustainability impacts of this MAD-oriented company.

Netafim 2013 Sustainability Report: At the heart of the food, water and land nexus

Netafim's 2013 Sustainability Report is written in accordance with GRI's G4 guidelines at core level. It presents both Netafim's 2020 sustainability strategy and most material impacts and the stakeholder engagement process that led to defining both. The report also presents many case studies showing how Netafim is driving it's MAD strategy and the impacts that MAD has at individual and community levels. If you want to skip straight to the stories, the report has a hyper-linked highlights page that will whiz you off to India, Croatia, Brazil, Kenya, Cyprus, Australia and the U.S. and more, to meet with growers and farmers that have gained benefits through adopting drip irrigation, becoming just a little bit MAD.

Or you might prefer to navigate straight to Stockholm. Stockholm holds special significance for Netafim as last year, in 2013, Netafim was awarded one of the highest levels of recognition in the industry for its impacts on water sustainability and sustainable water management at Stockholm Water Week, the Stockholm Industry Water Award (SIWA). This year, in 2014, Netafim presented its spanking new strategy and report in Stockholm. 

You can read on the blog of Netafim's Chief Sustainability Officer, Naty Barak, a staunch MAD propounder, as you might expect, about his experiences in Stockholm, and view Netafim's electronic poster presented at Stockholm 2014 Water Week here.  

But let's get back to drip and being MAD about MAD. Many of you might not know much about drip irrigation and why it is so crucial as a contributing solution to many of the worlds feed-energy-water-land scarcity problems. If this applies to you, you can find a brief explanation of how drip drips in Netafim's report. 

Following extensive consultation with stakeholders, both ongoing as part of Netafim's active participation in many of the leading global collaborative platforms that have water security as their prime focus, and as part of a targeted engagement program to support the preparation of the company's strategic approach and materiality definition, Netafim presents this new report under the theme: At the Heart of the Food-Water-Land Nexus. 

We are hearing more and more about The Nexus these days, especially in the context of the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda. It's not just one nexus. Sometimes it's the Food-Energy Nexus, sometimes, the Water-Energy Nexus. Netafim's MAD solutions have the biggest impacts in advancing food, water and land security and these are the three nexus elements that are predominantly relevant for Netafim. The nexus view considers not only each challenge as an individual challenge, but considers all of them as part of one Big Thing. The points at which these challenges interact are the points which offer the greatest global and local opportunities for leveraging smart solutions that deliver the greatest benefits for us and the planet. That's what drip irrigation does and that's why Netafim is totally all about MAD. 

In the run-up to the 2013 Sustainability Report, we helped facilitate stakeholder engagement at two levels: a large round-table discussion with a diverse group of stakeholders based in Israel where Netafim is headquartered, and a series of discussions with global experts in the sustainable agriculture and sustainable business fields. Experts such as Carlo Galli, Technical and Strategy Advisor, Water Resources at Nestlé, Gavin Power, Deputy Director, United Nations Global Compact, Alejandro Litovsky, Founder & CEO, Earth Security Initiative and Pasquale Steduto, Deputy Regional Representative for the Near East and North Africa, FAO  provided their expert input and guidance about MAD and other aspects of Netafim's contribution, and you can read some of their comments in the report.

The result of these consultations and management deliberations was a strategic framework for 2020 and a set of most material impacts around which the 2013 Sustainability Report was structured. These topics and themes will guide and support Netafim's ongoing contribution to global sustainability in the coming years.  

One of the things that we love most about our work at Beyond Business is seeing the personal change and transformation that comes through sustainability culture and practices. Most Sustainability Reports describe what a "company" is doing and how managers and employees take action in the course of their roles. This is great, of course, but there is something special about seeing how the concept of sustainability extends beyond the workplace and into the consciousness of people and other facets of their lives. That's why my favorite part of this report is a piece from Netafim's Marketing Manager, Rachel Shaul. Rachel selected a project related to the impact of drip irrigation as part of academic studies at university, and she shares her insights after having interviewed women farmers in the Indian State of Gujarat. Rachel's perspectives are not just about advancing Netafim's irrigation business, they are about the personal change she experienced in engaging with women farmers, and the way their lives have improved. In the report, Rachel shares some of the comments that she recorded in her interviews, reminding us that sustainability is more than a project or a product or a business, it's about people and life in general. 

I recommend (of course !) that you take a look at the Netafim report and (of course!) give feedback. Maybe you also might become a little MAD.


elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen   or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Strauss Group: a special 7th report

I am always delighted to showcase reports we have worked on for our clients, and this month, Strauss Group published its seventh annual Sustainability Report.

Strauss Group is an international corporation with a portfolio of five companies in the food and beverage sector, headquartered in Israel, active in 24 countries and generating $2.35 billion in consolidated sales in 2013. The Group directly employs over 13,500 people.  

7 is a very special number in many ways. It's the lowest natural number that cannot be represented as the sum of the squares of three integers. 7 is the aliquot sum of one number, the cubic number 8 and is the base of the 7-aliquot tree. 7 is the only dimension, besides the familiar 3, in which a vector cross product can be defined. 7 is the lowest dimension of a known exotic sphere. Of course, if you understood all of that, you are way more intelligent than I am. Or probably than anyone I know. I copy-pasted these 7-facts from Wikipedia. Impressive, right? In the Jewish religion, 7 is special in different ways. More copy-paste - here we come: 7 is one of the greatest power numbers in Judaism, representing Creation, good fortune, and blessing. The Bible is replete with things grouped in 7. Besides the Sabbath, the 7th day, there are 7 laws of Noah and 7 Patriarchs and Matriarchs. Several Jewish holidays are 7 days long, and priestly ordination takes 7 days. The Land of Israel was allowed to lie fallow one year in 7. The menorah in the Temple has 7 branches. There's more from the Rabbi ... check it out here. In numerology, the number 7 is the seeker, the thinker, the searcher of Truth. The 7 doesn't take anything at face value - it is always trying to understand the underlying, hidden truths. The 7 knows that nothing is exactly as it seems and that reality is often hidden behind illusions. More for numerologists here. In gambling, number 7 is really lucky. According to the Psychic Library website, on July 7, 2007, the casinos were full up as hopefuls tried to beat the lucky date 07/07/07 (maybe they also went at 07:07 in the morning!) Someone even wrote a book about the magical, amazing and popular number 7. 

So, having established that 7 is special, we might then expect something special from Strauss Group's 7th Sustainability Report. Here are 7 special things about Strauss Group's 7th Sustainability Report.

First, it's prepared in accordance with GRI G4 (core), a first for Strauss. So far, worldwide, just a few hundred companies have ventured into G4 territory. Actually, the stretch was not overly significant for Strauss, as a deep materiality review had been conducted in 2012 and presented in Strauss's 2012 report. In 2013, in preparation for this report, further consultation with stakeholders was conducted and resulted in a revised focus on six core material issues. The main narrative of the report is aligned with these six material themes. 

Second, each materiality-based chapter presents the core issues, aligned strategic goals, GRI G4 material Aspects and reported Performance Indicators. As you will know if you have read my G4-Game-changer series, this is a critical element of a G4 report. There must be an audit trail from strategy to materiality to performance. The Strauss Group report ensures this is as clear as you can get. 

Third, this report presents Strauss Groups's 2020 Sustainability Strategy. Strauss Group has been assimilating sustainability practices into its operations for many years. This is the first time the Group has worked across company-boundaries and created a global corporate multi-year strategy with measurable targets. The strategy has two elements: impact and performance. Each has three dimensions.

In the Impact element, the three dimensions relate to the direct connection of stakeholders to the company. Colleagues (employees) are the first degree of impact. They are the first to experience the way the company behaves toward them, and they are also the ambassadors of the company and define the way the company impacts other stakeholders. Consumers are a much larger group, of course, and they are directly impacted by the product quality, choice, availability, access and messaging of Strauss Group. The way Strauss impacts consumers has a direct result on the quality of their lives and the way they connect to the company's products. Finally, the Citizenship dimension represents Strauss Group's impacts on society, the environment and all relevant stakeholders. By improving impacts in a spirit of citizenship, ethical behavior, efficient resource management and transparency, Strauss Group continues to make a positive impact as a good corporate citizen. 

In each dimension, the 2020 Sustainability Strategy defines 3 levels of performance - meet, exceed and lead. Meet refers to meeting the basic performance expectations of society and all stakeholders in relation to commonly accepted standards of responsible behavior including governance, compliance and ethics. Exceed represents continuous improvement, exceeding prior performance in certain strategically defined performance areas. Lead refers to a smaller number of performance areas where Strauss aspires to make significant progress and achieve levels of impact that can be considered leading performance at a global level. In this way, the Sustainability Strategy defines the scope and scale and degree of impact improvement that Strauss Group plans to achieve in the next few years. 

Fourth, Aron Cramer, CEO of BSR and one of the leading thinkers and opinion-leaders in sustainability today, reviewed Strauss's material issues and strategic direction and provided guidance. "Strauss should be focused on real issues that are driven by core products. These could include enhancing consumer choice, helping consumers understand the health implications of consumption habits, through product labeling and other means, and sustainable sourcing." His full commentary can be found in the report.  

Fifth, the people. Strauss people appear on many pages of this report and they are the ones that make it all happen. Working with Strauss Group, we are privileged to meet many employees in the course of our varied interactions with Strauss around the world, and we can testify to the Strauss spirit and values that motivate and inspire employees to do great things. Employee engagement at Strauss reaches 92% in parts of the Group, based on employee surveys, and that's what makes this 7th report (and all previous ones) special. 

Sixth, the infographic. It's always good to get the report highlights all in one place. If you are a numbers person, this is the page for you.

7th, is the fact that it's the 7th. Delivering a sustainability report year after year is no easy task. Strauss Group is the only Israel-based company to date that has published  7 reports, year after year, since 2008, demonstrating not only a commitment to transparency and continuous improvement, but also a commitment to local leadership and best practice. 

For us at Beyond Business, supporting clients such as Strauss, as we do around the world, is a privilege and we are delighted to have been able to help create this 7th report. 

Oh and by the way, I should also mention that the number 7 is very relevant to the world of ice cream too. I happened to come across, in my search for all things 7, this announcement by Perry's Ice Cream of 7 new flavors for 2014.  They all sound delicious. As 2014 is nearly over, I had better start tasting.....

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen   or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)