To support and expand work on living wages, Eosta has joined IDH’s Roadmap on Living Wages. Eosta, a leading importer, packer, and distributor of organically grown fresh produce, regards living wage as the most important topic in the social domain for the coming years.
IDH’s Roadmap on Living Wages is an initiative steered by a dozen leading companies with advice from key sustainability organizations, and created to build consensus and alignment around definitions, tools and approaches for companies to work on living wages in a uniformed way. Eosta will take a seat in the steering committee of the Roadmap. Other steering committee members include the retailers Axfood, Sainsbury’s, Rewe Group, Tesco, Metro, Aldi North, Aldi South, and companies such as Fyffes, Dole, Unilever and Afriflora.
Eosta has a pragmatic approach when it comes to bringing living wages into practice. We learn by doing. Joining the Roadmap on Living Wages puts us in the front line of tackling this important issue. IDH is an important driver in the process towards credible and effective mechanisms to determine living wage gaps in fresh supply chains. This is an important bases towards fair pricing and value sharing in fresh produce value chains. I am looking forward to join this committee
stated Gert-Jan Lieffering, Quality Development Manager at Eosta.
Eosta, with headquarters in the Netherlands, serves major retailers and natural food stores in Europe. Eosta products carry a unique three digit Nature & More ‘trace & tell’ code and/or a QR-code that provides retailers and consumers with direct web access to the producers’ profile. Each producer reflects his unique story about his social and ecological impact, based on the sustainability flower model.
In a recent publication, Eosta announced its efforts to carry out a living wage gap assessment for the workers of its mango supplier Fruiteq in Burkina Faso. The assessment shows that an additional cost of 10 cents per kilo of mangoes would suffice to close the pay gap for all 199 employees.
In this publication, Eosta states that ‘decent wages should be a pre-competitive element in business’. Through this report, Eosta wants to initiate a discussion and raise awareness amongst her clients and final consumers, to make it possible that, in the future, the price of a mango reflects the true social cost of production, including living wage for workers in Burkina Faso. Together with customers and consumers, Eosta will put this process in motion.
We are looking forward to Eosta’s participation in the Roadmap on Living Wages and to continue to strengthen a long-standing relationship we have built over the years working in different sustainability efforts
said Sonia Cordera, deputy director at IDH.
Eosta has been part of IDH’s Sustainability Initiative Fruit & Vegetables (SIFAV) from the start and has been very active in, amongst others, the smallholder working group and through setting-up and executing innovative projects. They were the first SIFAV-partner to calculate living wage and living income gaps outside the banana sector, first in Kenya and now in Burkina Faso.
Eosta regards living wage as the most important topic in the social domain for the coming years. If we want our products truly to be sustainable, we need to combat poverty and narrowing the wealth gap within our supply chains
concluded Lieffering.