Materiality

To identify and prioritise the issues that are most relevant to our stakeholders and our business we analyse our stakeholders’ expectations as well as the social, environmental and economic impacts along our value chain in a materiality analysis.

We take a three-stage approach to identifying material sustainability issues and report against those of most interest to our stakeholders and those where we have the most significant impact.

  1. Identification. We conduct an annual review of a long list of topics based on analysis of external standards and interest.
  2. Prioritisation. We score and prioritise topics based on how often they are raised by stakeholders and their level of economic, environmental and social impact — seeking input from internal and external stakeholders.
  3. Review. We regularly review and refresh our materiality matrix with key stakeholders, considering emerging challenges while remaining focused on delivering our sustainability strategy.

Material Issues 2022

For 2022, we have made our ten salient human rights issues explicit in the materiality analysis. In 2021, they were captured under “fair jobs” and “human rights due diligence”. Considering updated GRI guidelines, we assessed and regrouped material indicators for a more accurate representation of our material topics. As such, “scale innovation”, “transparency” and “partner for industry-wide progress” are enablers, rather than material topics themselves, and have thus been removed from the matrix.

Like previous years, our stakeholder survey has confirmed high perception of our sustainability work. Due to increased attention on transparency and sustainability claims in 2022, we have included “marketing and labelling” as a standalone material topic. We see an increase in stakeholder requests for further details on “wages and compensation”, “waste including packaging”, as well as “biodiversity”, thus they have moved up in stakeholder importance compared to last year.

As such, the number of material topics as presented in the analysis has increased for 2022.

In anticipation of the 2024 Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), we have expanded our materiality analysis by incorporating where in the value chain our material topics present the most significant impact. This is based on our ongoing risk and impact assessment processes. We have provided direct links on how we address these impacts as presented in our Sustainability Disclosure.

We have collected and integrated feedback from internal and external stakeholders, and considering the changes ahead, we have focussed on validation in 2023. For 2024, our aim is to fully report along CSRD guidelines and present a double materiality analysis.

Materiality matrix 2022