How sustainable is your breakfast ?

How Sustainable Is Your Cereal?

Grading Our Progress to a More Sustainable Future 

Since 2014, we have been expanding our efforts to become a more sustainable company by focusing an eco-friendly eye at the ingredients Kellogg buys and how we turn them into the foods consumers love.

This started with building a more environmentally conscious supply chain that does things like:

• Trains farmers from Nebraska to Thailand on best practices in climate-smart agriculture
• Carefully purchases ten key ingredients including palm oil to minimize the environmental impact of what we purchase.
• Supports dozens of other locally focused and global sustainability efforts.

We are also committed to minimizing our own impacts through efforts like reducing our water usage by 15% and producing our own low-carbon energy when making and packaging our foods and measuring our supplier’s contributions to environmentally friendly practices.

These efforts are part of our commitments to sustainability that include specific goals to be accomplished by 2020.

Like any journey, checkpoints along the way help ensure we stay on the right path, so we are dedicated to measuring and reporting our progress.

To do this, we rely on third-party organizations such as CDP to validate our progress. CDP (formally known as Carbon Disclosure Project) is a non-profit organization that runs a global system for reporting and disclosure by investors, companies and governments to manage their environmental impacts.
Every year, we share data with CDP via a survey mechanism. They in turn use this data to compile a scorecard that measures our performance based on sharing of data, awareness of issues, management of environmental impacts and industry leadership.

In 2016, we received nearly straight A’s from CDP demonstrating our global and industry leadership in addressing environmental impacts.

Each survey (climate, forests, water and supplier) has different questions to assess our environmental priorities. We also use the supply chain survey to share our data with key retailers and partners (such as Walmart and the California Department of General Services) helping them measure and calculate their own environmental impact.

Across the Kellogg scorecards, we are particularly proud of the following accomplishments:

• Scoring within the top 25% of all organizations in our active leadership to address climate change.
• Being a global leader in combatting deforestation.
• Receiving an A- on sustainably sourcing palm oil.
• Implementing a range of actions to manage water and mitigate water risk, both in our own operations and beyond them.
• Promoting best practices throughout our supply chain from farms to ingredient processors and suppliers.

But our journey is far from complete. While A’s on a report card are nice, we still have a ways to go to meet all of our commitments in the areas of responsibly sourcing ingredients, reducing waste, water use, energy use and greenhouses gas emissions. There is more work to do but we are glad to be on this journey to make our foods better for our consumers…and our planet.