Objective

Like many food service companies, M&J and the Brakes Group are sourcing food from around the world to offer customers a wide range of innovative products to increase year-round availability. They wanted to engage with their suppliers on social responsibility issues beyond “lip service” that is currently being paid to ethical trading in some sectors, and they also saw the potential for quality and productivity improvements through closer involvement with their suppliers.

Action

M&J and Brakes decided to take a two-pronged approach to build up their experience in this area and refine their approach.

Firstly to make ethical trading central to M&J Seafood’s trading philosophy, by building up the expertise of all supplier facing staff on ethical trading so that they take a common approach to interfacing with suppliers on this issue. Employees have been trained to detect ethical issues whilst on site visits and use ethical trading as part of the supplier selection process.

Secondly to carry out third-party audits on a limited “high risk” supplier base selected on whether the supplier produces M&J/Brakes-label product, level of turnover with the group, ethical profile of country and or product.

A pilot study was carried out in Bangladesh, which led to a programme of improvements developed by M&J/Brakes buyers, the supplier and the third-party auditor, Impactt.

Result

M&J/Brakes and Impactt identified that improvements could be made to the availability of drinking water and accommodation provided to workers at the factory. As a key customer of this company, M&J/Brakes interest in working conditions has stimulated a discussion between the supplier’s senior and factory management. Third-party audits are also being carried out on further selected suppliers.
 
About the authors   The Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) and Traidcraft are part of the Responsible Purchasing Initiative (RPI). The RPI works with purchasers and sourcing experts to learn from and improve how sourcing from developing countries contributes to sustainable development and to develop good practice. For more information visit

www.responsible-purchasing.org