Sustainability Plan
The Lindt & Sprüngli Sustainability Plan is our strategy for optimizing our impact on societies, environments, and economies in which we are present. It reflects our core company values of Excellence, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Responsibility, and Collaboration.
Our Sustainability Plan centers around Lindt & Sprüngli’s priority focus areas, grouped under four purpose pillars:
- Improving the livelihoods of people in our supply chain
- Contributing to an intact environment
- Fostering successful collaboration within the company
- Delighting our consumers
In building our sustainability strategy and making disclosures around our purpose pillars, we aim to contribute to optimizing our positive social impact and reducing our environmental footprint. Upholding business ethics and integrity and respecting human rights are critical aspects that extend across all elements of our value chain and the Sustainability Plan.
The Sustainability Plan constitutes one element of our business strategy. It underpins our drive to realize sustainable transformation, and protect our growth by proactively addressing strategic sustainability risks and impacts. It contains initiatives with the potential to curtail costs and mitigate risks by promoting resource efficiency, bolstering operational resilience, fortifying our supply chain, and safeguarding product quality. The Sustainability Plan further harmonizes with our business strategy by yielding intangible yet impactful advantages, such as contributing to our quality offering and premium positioning, heightened brand perception, steadfast consumer loyalty, and increased employee engagement and retention.
We analyze our progress annually and derive or adjust action plans if needed. Since our current Sustainability Plan targets for many focus areas culminate in 2025, we have started working on our post-2025 Sustainability Plan. This will be based on the latest DMA results (see Our material topics in the Impact, risk, and opportunity management chapter) and will be disclosed in our Sustainability Report 2025.
Progress in addressing some challenging structural issues in heavily impacted countries, including reducing poverty and hunger, and increasing educational opportunities, is crucial. Since Lindt & Sprüngli cannot build a sustainable tomorrow alone, the concerted, continued, compliant, and genuine efforts of various stakeholders are vital to success in this endeavor.
It is challenging to ensure all sustainability standards are upheld across a complex supply chain integrating many actors. We also have to respond effectively to temporary deviations or setbacks due to market disruption in order to assure business continuity. The rapid evolution and regional variations of applicable regulations may require the Group to delay or adjust its voluntary actions or targets, to ensure that priority is given to compliance and staying up to date with regulatory requirements.
Sustainability initiatives and transformation require investments to support the Group’s long-term growth. As with all investments, we must manage the pace and scale of sustainability investments to ensure strong financial performance in the near and medium term. Availability of market-ready solutions or technologies is also crucial to progress. For example, we are facing challenges in finding alternative packaging solutions. Similarly, there may be limited market availability of raw material volumes certified according to our certification standards.
The complexity of interconnected social and environmental factors also requires addressing trade-offs. For example, the need to ensure food safety when producing new recipes and product ranges may result in an increase in semi-finished product waste. Balancing out factors such as emissions from packaging materials against their recyclability, performance against quality, or changes in product mix or consumer preference, can all impact the assumptions used in setting targets.
Click on the graphic to find out more about each of the focus areas.
interactive
Business ethics and integrity and human rights
Improving Livehoods
Contributing to an Intact Environment
