SUSTAINABILITY APPROACH
MANAGEMENT
Sustainability thinking and practice is growing in strategic importance across Tiger Brands. Sustainability imperatives cut across the key pillars of our growth strategy, and executive management plays a key role in driving the implementation of our sustainability strategy to meet strategic business objectives.
Management’s oversight
The implementation of our sustainability strategy is driven by chief officers who are members of our executive committee (Exco) and supported by senior managers with direct responsibility for specific sustainability-related activities. Our Exco facilitates the management of Tiger Brands’ operational activities, and is directly responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of policies and strategy, and driving progress against operational-level goals and targets, including those relating to sustainability and climate change. The Exco meets at least monthly, and more often when necessary. More information on the Exco is reported in the IR, available at: www.tigerbrands.com
Remuneration incentives
We provide performance incentives for the management of sustainability-related issues through the short-term incentive scheme (STI). Our STI remuneration incentives are indirectly related to sustainability performance via weighted measures for achieving strategic objectives in efficiency, quality and safety. The incentives are applicable across the group from senior executives to factory workers. We continue to enhance our remuneration strategy to improve alignment with the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure and reward performance against our business strategy.
Key sustainability management roles:
- The chief marketing and strategy officer – supported by the innovation director, research and development operations director and category marketing directors implement activities aimed at enabling consumers to improve their health and wellbeing and ensuring responsible marketing and communications practice.
- The chief human resources officer – supported by the people experience director and human resources directors for categories and functions implement activities aimed at building a purpose-led culture, characterised by strong leaders, diverse future-fit talent, robust employee relations and an inclusive and energising workplace.
- The chief corporate affairs and sustainability officer – supported by the director for enterprise and supplier development, director external affairs, and sustainability and external reporting director – implement activities aimed at building partnerships, improving the livelihoods of thousands of people, driving accountability to society and reporting on sustainability to the public.
- The chief manufacturing officer – supported by the supply chain operations support director, director for safety, health and environment, and risk and sustainability director – implement activities aimed at building an ethical supply chain, ensuring food safety and quality, managing safety, security, health, and environment (SSHE), and significantly reducing our environmental footprint.
- The chief growth officers (CGOs) for Consumer Brands, Milling and Baking, have full responsibility and accountability for the sustainability performance of their divisions, and report directly to the CEO.
- The chief legal officer – supported by the compliance director and group company secretary, drives processes and systems aimed at inculcating a culture of ethical behaviour and managing activities relating to human rights protection, whistleblowing, anti-corruption and bribery, and training in respect of the code of conduct and declaration of interest policies.
- The Chief Corporate Affairs and Sustainability Officer – supported by the Sustainability and External Reporting Director – is responsible for the management of sustainability- and climate-related risks and opportunities, and driving the integration of these issues into our existing Group risk management processes (see the IR).
- The chief executive officer (CEO), is fully accountable to the board on the management of sustainability issues, and ensures that the sustainability strategy is effectively integrated into the business.
Management processes
Policy framework
We have a robust policy framework that supports the governance and management of ethical business practice and behaviour, and social and environmental impacts. Our policy framework aligns with all relevant legislation and supports our compliance activities. All policies are audited internally on a regular basis to ensure they adequately drive compliance with relevant legislation, and routine management processes ensure that all policies are regularly updated.
Impacts, risks and opportunities
Sustainability and climate impacts, risks and opportunities are very relevant to Tiger Brands’ business model and operations, with key impacts and risks in the supply chain, and key opportunities in our value chain. We have formalised processes for identifying sustainability and climate change impacts and risks at operational and strategic levels and are making continuous improvements to these processes. We aim to improve our visibility on and management of these issues to build the resilience of our business going forward, and to strengthen our sustainability disclosure.
We assess social and environmental impacts and risks at an operational level through our manufacturing excellence customs and practices (MECP) standardised practices. The manufacturing units report on environmental and social indicators, which are collated into an overall scorecard, included on the risk register if necessary, and reported quarterly to Exco. Any necessary mitigation plans are reviewed on a quarterly basis in the RSC and SETCO, and ultimately reported to the board.
We assess sustainability and climate-related risk at a strategic level in relation to our strategic business objectives as part of our enterprise risk management (ERM) processes, and we include these risks in the group risk matrix. Currently, we treat sustainability and climate change each as a single emerging risk, because of the sheer size and complexity of the issues in their scope, which we are now beginning to unpack. We have not formally ranked these risk areas, but we have tabled them with the RSC.
We do not yet have a formal system for integrating detailed analysis of these risk areas into our existing risk management processes, but are still making progress on building our insights into these issues through our current processes. We monitor the emerging sustainability and climate-related risks from both bottom-up and top-down directions through our operational MECP and strategic ERM processes, and capture specific risk sub-themes as the relationship with our business becomes apparent. The risks captured are reviewed through the RSC and escalated where necessary. This includes the potential impact of climate change on our operations, strategy, supply chain, and markets.
More information on our risk management processes is reported in our IR, available at: www.tigerbrands.com
Assurance
We have adopted a combined assurance model that includes internal and external assurance processes for financial and non-financial data, as described more fully in our IR. We are working to build a more sophisticated digital system for the management of our sustainability data, and have approved a project and budget to do so in 2023. This data management system will enable the establishment of more formal assurance processes for a wider array of non-financial sustainability data, as well as more robust assurance of this data through a formal assurance statement.